


THE UNITED ST/VrfiS 
AND' CANADA 

GEORGE M,WI^OKG 






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THE UNITED STATES 
AND CANADA 

A POLITICAL STUDY 



By 

GEORGE M. WRONG 

Professor of Hietory in the University of Toronto 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



Copyright, 1921, by 
GEORGE M. WRONG 



JUL -2 '2.1 A 

Ci.A614892 " ^ 



WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 



GEORGE SLOCUM BENNETT FOUNDATION 



LECTURES 



For the Promotion of a Better Under- 
standing of National Problems end 
of a More Perfect Realization of 
the Responsibilities of Citizenship 



SECOND SERIES— 1919-1920 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction 7 

Preface 11 

Lecture I 
The Dominance of the English-speaking 
Peoples in America 13 

Lecture II 
The Creation of Two English-speaking 
States in America 39 

Lecture III 
The Growth of Federalism in North 
America 65 

Lecture IV 
Likenesses and Contrasts in the Federal 
Systems of the United States and Canada 85 

Lecture V 
The Place of Canada in the British Com- 
monwealth 124 

Lecture VI 
The Future 154 



INTRODUCTION 

George Slocum Bennett, a graduate of 
Wesley an University in the class of 1864, 
showed his lifelong interest in the training of 
youth for the privileges and duties of citi- 
zenship by long periods of service as a mem- 
ber of the board of education of his home 
city, and as member of the boards of trustees 
of Wyoming Seminary and Wesley an Uni- 
versity. 

It was fitting, therefore, that, when the 
gifts made by himself and family to Wes- 
leyan University were combined to form a 
fund whose income should be used "in de- 
fraying the expenses of providing for visit- 
ing lecturers, preachers, and other speakers 
supplemental to the college faculty," it 
should have been decided that the primary 
purpose should be to provide each year a 

7 



8 INTRODUCTION 

course of lectures, by a distinguished 
speaker, "for the promotion of a better un- 
derstanding of national problems and of a 
more perfect realization of the responsibili- 
ties of citizenship," and to provide for the 
publication of such lectures so that they 
might reach a larger public than the audi- 
ence to which they should, in the first in- 
stance, be addressed. 

To give the second course of lectures on 
this foundation, the joint committee for its 
administration, appointed by the board of 
trustees and by the faculty, selected George 
Mackinnon Wrong, professor of history in 
the University of Toronto. This choice was 
made in hearty recognition of the closer sym- 
pathy which had drawn the two sister nations 
of English speech on this continent to one 
another in the comradeship of arms, of ideals, 
and of losses in the World War.. It was also 
made in appreciation not merely of Profes- 
sor Wrong's high scholarship as an historian, 
but also of the fine spirit in which he has 



INTRODUCTION 9 

ever exemplified his conviction that the Eng- 
lish-speaking peoples, especially on this con- 
tinent, should live together in friendship and 
work together for the advancement in the 
world of liberty, self-government, and peace. 
William Arnold Shanklin, 
Reuben Nelson Bennett, 
Albeet Wheelee Johnston, 
Frank Edgar Farley, 
George Matthew Dutcher, 

Committee. 



PREFACE 

Lectures to a university audience should, 
of course, express the detached mind of a 
searcher after truth, and I have tried to 
maintain this attitude and to refrain from 
either praise or blame in discussing both the 
present and the past. My aim has been to 
explain, in no recondite or learned way, 
some of the things in which the United States 
and Canada are alike and also different. 

Canada reads much more about the United 
States than the United States reads about 
Canada, just as Scotland reads more about 
England than England reads about Scot- 
land. This condition is inevitable when a 
nation with a small population lies side by 
side with a greater neighbor speaking the 
same language. To the thought of the peo- 
ple of the United States, numbering a hun- 
dred millions, Canada, with its eight mil- 
lions, does not loom large ; while the opposite 
condition is found in Canada. Many of the 
books and the newspapers which Canadians 
11 



12 PREFACE 

read are impregnated with American 
thought, while Canada exercises practically 
no influence upon her neighbor. 

It is chiefly due to this lack of reciprocity 
in thought that occasionally, in quarters gen- 
erally well informed, discussions arise as to 
whether, to cancel her debt, Great Britain 
might not sell Canada to the United States. 
Such a proposal causes a pained smile on the 
faces of people on both sides of the frontier 
who really understand. England might as 
well propose to sell Scotland to France or 
Germany. Sometimes too a desire is ex- 
pressed to help to liberate Canada. The only 
answer to such suggestions is to try to reach 
a better understanding of the relations of 
the two peoples and it was to aid, however 
slightly, in effecting this that these lectures 
were given. 

I am greatly indebted to Professor George 
M. Dutcher, vice-president of Wesley an 
University, for many personal kindnesses 
and to my friend Professor W. Bennett 
Munro, of Harvard University, for helpful 
criticism. 

University of Toeonto. G. M. W. 



LECTURE I 

THE DOMINANCE OF THE ENG- 
LISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES 
IN AMERICA 

Eras of excitement and passion are invari- 
ably followed by disillusion and reaction, and 
the days after the Great War have seen this 
inevitable result. Over the beautiful portal 
of a churchyard in England were written the 
words, *'This is none other than the Gate of 
Heaven." In a stormy season the custodian 
put on the gatepost the notice that "owing 
to the inclemency of the weather this gate is 
closed until further notice." This is our state 
of mind at the present time. During the 
days of peace the political weather has 
proved inclement and a good many people 
are wondering whether the sun will ever 
shine again. The joy of battle is exhilarat- 
ing, even if the fight is exhausting. When 
peace with victory was still beyond reach we 
desired it with a great longing. Now it has 
come. The old stimulus is gone and not yet 
13 



14 THE UNITED STATES 

have we been able to concentrate our 
thoughts upon that goal in the future which 
will inspire us to combined effort. Faintheart 
is tempted to be weary and depressed. 

It is probably true that the war would not 
have taken place if during the last ten years 
the English-speaking peoples had shown that 
they were united. Wisdom after the event 
is not of a very exacting or penetrating kind, 
and we need not lay too much emphasis upon 
what might have been. Clearly, however, if 
the vast array of power which is represented 
by the United States and the British Com- 
monwealth had been used during the last ten 
years to say that there should be no war, its 
word might well have proved effective even 
to restrain Germany's lust for world power. 
In fact, as we know, Germany did not be- 
Keve that the nations within the British Com- 
monwealth would unite to check her; and it 
would have required something very definite 
and precise to make her believe that the 
United States could be counted upon to act 
with them. It remains true, however, that 
voices speaking in English might have pre- 
served the world which existed before 1914. 



AND CANADA 15 

It may, indeed, be well that that world, 
sick as now we see it to have been, should go. 
Not always is it true that in the sunlight we 
see the truth most clearly. It is in the dark- 
ness of the night that the stars glow and the 
moon shines with a beauty which may not be 
seen at midday. In the darkness of sorrow 
and sacrifice men learn to know the mysteries 
of their own hearts. This appears to be an 
ultimate law of life, and it is vain to question 
the constitution of a world in which we our- 
selves play so feeble a part. The long dark- 
ness of more than four years of war revealed 
to us things which we did not see in the sun- 
shine. Both evil and good have been made 
manifest — good perhaps more than evil, for 
the war brought out a heroism and a readi- 
ness for sacrifice in the heart of the common 
man which we had either never known or had 
forgotten. 

Whatever might have been done before 
tIi/5 war, now at least we confront a realized 
situation unprecedented in character. As a 
result of the war the strongest nations left 
in the western world are the English-speak- 
ing nations. Possibly more even than Ger- 



16 THE UNITED STATES 

many is France exhausted, with a grim strip 
of ruin three hundred and fifty miles long 
forming her northeastern frontier. Desola- 
tion reigns where once were fertile fields, 
prosperous villages, and ancient and beauti- 
ful towns and cities. Lille is maimed; Arras, 
Cambrai, and a dozen other cities are heaps 
of ruins; and hundreds of thousands of the 
best manhood of France he under the white 
crosses that mark the resting places of her 
multitudinous dead. Italy is impoverished; 
Austria and Hungary are prostrate ; and of 
all the states of continental Europe it is per- 
haps true that defeated Germany can look 
forward to the future with the greatest as- 
surance. Were it not for the vigor and 
resources of the English-speaking world, we 
might see again what has happened before, 
that the vanquished, in the moment of his 
defeat, is the real conqueror. Long ago the 
energy of the English mastered the conquer- 
ing Norman who ruled in England, just as 
Rome in her defeat became the schoolmaster 
of her barbarian masters and turned them 
into her servants. 

The United States has now one hundred 



AND CANADA 17 

and five million people. As yet of some of 
the new-comers English is not the language 
of daily life, but it will certainly be the lan- 
guage of their children and of their children's 
children. Within the British Commonwealth 
there are some sixty-five million people who 
speak EngMsh. It is thus the tongue of one 
hundred and seventy million people, nearly 
two-thirds of them in the single contiguous 
area of the United States. Never before 
has the world seen such a condition — nearly 
two hundred million people who speak and 
write and think in English, who can exchange 
without misunderstanding the niceties of 
thought in a language simple in structure, 
with a great range in its vocabulary, and a 
literaturf' in patent and variety Hurpassirg 
any other m existence. The v/ar iias brought 
the unlooked-for result that two great con- 
quering peoples with this wonderful speech 
are, if they choose so to be, the masters of the 
destinies of the world. 

Goethe was wont to say that, had his native 
tongue been English, he would hardly have 
ventured to write poetry, since the long line 
of Enghsh poets had expressed already what 



18 THE UNITED STATES 

would have come to his mind. A people with 
a noble hterature at their command have a 
great advantage among the nations. A gen- 
eration without a hterature from the past 
and limited by its own thought is indeed 
poor. Society is too complex for us to esti- 
mate the effect upon the hfe of to-day of the 
background of thought from a nation's past, 
but it is undoubtedly very great. It is true, 
of course, that only a few read any books but 
those of the present ; but it is also true that 
in these very books is summed up the influ- 
ence on the mind of the writers of all the 
past. Shakespeare and Milton speak 
through even the mediocre author of to-day. 
By schoolbook and newspaper, by quotation 
and proverb, the minds of great writers have 
helped to form present-day thought. A na- 
tion is what it reads more truly, perhaps, than 
it is what it eats. 

When two peoples speak in the same lan- 
guage, this common influence must tend to 
make them alike. What is said in New York 
on one day may be circulated in the same 
form in London on the day following, and 
will carry with it whatever strength its in- 



AND CANADA 19 

herent truth commands. It falls upon soil 
already prepared by a long succession of sim- 
ilar happenings in the past. To every point 
where the English tongue is spoken the 
thought may be carried. Be it radical or 
conservative, it conveys its message, and the 
men who read it tend to grow together in 
mental outlook. Counteracting influences 
there are, of course; contrasts of tradition 
and environment which involve differing em- 
phasis upon the same thoughts ; but the com- 
mon language is a mighty power for similar- 
ity of outlook. The people who read both 
Emerson and Mill, by so much tend to come 
together; and when the people are those of 
the far-flung states of the British Common- 
wealth and the American Union the influ- 
ence soon becomes world-wide. 

In some such way we may believe was 
Greek thought carried from one Greek- 
speaking community to another. The chief 
endowment which the Greeks took from the 
home land was that of its language and its 
Hterature. The insight and the vivacity of 
the Greek mind working in the scene of the 
coasts and islands of the eastern Mediter- 



20 THE UNITED STATES 

ranean were suited to the creation of small 
states, with no political tie other than the 
Greek spirit. Greece produced Plato and 
Aristotle, men who pondered deeply, in an 
environment compact enough to be under- 
stood, the problems of human hfe and espe- 
cially those of the organization of man in 
society. The Republic of Plato and the 
Politics of Aristotle are treatises on man liv- 
ing under the influence of political ties with 
his fellows. Expressed in the vigorous and 
lucid language of Greece, they were carried 
far. They survived the ruin of the Roman 
Empire, they were debated with awe and rev- 
erence by the later philosophy of the Middle 
Ages, and they play still their vital part in 
the discussions of our own day. Such was 
the triumph of a literatm^e in a language 
fitted for the expression of rich thought. 

We can hardly doubt that English is the 
successor of Greek as the chief tongue of 
political theory. The most vital thought in 
modern political society comes from sources 
in the English tongue. The eternal glory 
of England in the world of poHtics is that 
the island state, secure in its frontiers, was 



AND CANADA 21 

able, first of European nations, to shake off 
the sway of the despot and to secure for its 
people real political power. It was England 
who gave to the world representative institu- 
tions, that type of political society in which 
authority is yielded to persons chosen by the 
people ruled, to control Liid in time to admin- 
ister their government. It was England's 
daughter who added to this the principle 
which has borne the test of experience, that 
free states, while retaining their local liber- 
ties, might unite for common purposes and 
carry representative institutions into a union 
of states in a wider nation. Successful fed- 
eralism is the achievement of America. The 
principle made only dim gropings in politi- 
cal society until the thirteen colonies brought 
it into the full light of the world. 

Language is the expression of the spirit 
of a people and in a subtle way carries with 
it some suggestion of their outlook on na- 
tional hfe. The phases of society which a 
writer chooses to emphasize reveal some 
measure of its moral tone, its intellectual out- 
look and its political condition. Fogazzaro's 
Saint, haunted by the problems of asceticism. 



22 THE UXITED STATES 

shows us the attitude of the clerical mind of 
Italy with which that of England has, we 
see at once, very little in common. Victor 
Hugo reveals, half unconsciously to himself, 
the crude and unstable despotism of the Sec- 
ond Empire in France which he assailed. 
Dickens lays bare the mind of the bourgeoisie 
and the lower orders in England. It is said 
that translations of the works of Dickens are 
popular in China and the explanation is of- 
fered that it is because of a subtle affinity of 
English with Chinese political thought, the 
dislike of militarism and absolutism, and 
with this a certain humorous decency con- 
genial to Chinese readers. English is at least 
simple and direct. One of its greatest re- 
cent triumphs is the use of the word "tank" 
to describe a complicated mechanism of mod- 
ern war. It is impossible to imagine the 
English calling a great avenue the "Champs 
Elysees" or naming a thoroughfare the 
"Street of the Twentieth of September." 

There is no better evidence of the virihty 
of the Enghsh speech than its changes in 
America. The language was matured in the 
settled environment of England, and it ex- 



AND CANADA 23 

presses the social relations of a graded soci- 
ety". The owner of land let to tenants is still 
the landlord, though for the most part there 
is little left in the relation which is lordly. 
In Northumberland the women who work in 
the fields are still called bondagers, but no 
trace remains of such a relation in their de- 
meanor nor in their money wage of four shil- 
lings a day. On the other hand the free, new 
life of western America knows nothing of 
lords or bondage and has no need for such 
terms. It matures for the use of a changed 
society a language which, at any rate, never 
lacks vigor and is Enghsh in structure if 
hardly so in vocabulary. The educated 
classes in New England cultivate a precision 
of speech more exacting in its standards than 
is the language of the same class in the 
mother land. In all fields alike the English 
tongue is the medium. The most violent as- 
sailant of England, to make himself under- 
stood with effect, must in the greater part 
of the world denounce her in her own lan- 
guage. 

Perhaps the most pregnant fact in modern 
political life is that the Enghsh-speaking 



24 THE UNITED STATES 

peoples have become dominant in North 
America. Colmnbus was the servant of 
Spain, and she was resolved to have the 
greater part of both North and South Amer- 
ica for herself and to permit no neighbors. 
Her claim to rule alone meant that any tri- 
imiph of a rival would be to her own com- 
plete exclusion. Spain asked the protec- 
tion of the church for her rights, and Eng- 
land, when she defied the church, aimed to 
make herself a terror to Spain in America. 
England's ships haunted the Spanish Main. 
In 1607 bhc pL'intrd her foot in Virginia and 
there remained. She too was resolved to 
have no neighbor, and when Catholic France 
occupied the valley of the Saint Lawrence, 
it was the fixed resolve of English policy for 
a hundred and fifty years to drive her out. 
I have sometimes wondered what would to- 
day be the condition of society in New Eng- 
land had Spain or France, and not Eng- 
land, finally held its coasts. There may be 
some doubt as to whether man is stronger 
than his environment ; as to whether, no mat- 
ter what the race, nature would not have 
determined the physical type. But it is 



AND CANADA 25 

quite certain that England gave to her col- 
onies something that has made this land to- 
day mentally different from what France or 
Spain would have made it. The language, 
the reUgion, the manners of the masses, the 
education of a New England town, would 
have been other than they are had Spain or 
France planted here a new society. Be- 
cause the English race secured final pos- 
session the traditions which go with English 
rule and English speech here took root, and 
the very spires of the churches proclaim to 
the air that the English seed has grown to 
a great tree. 

America brought her own special gifts to 
the civilization of the world. Old things and 
new America offered to Europe. There 
were the coveted gold and silver of her mines 
to increase stores in Europe which had, so 
far as we know, received but slight additions 
since the days of the Roman Empire. While 
this was not in reality America's most pre- 
cious store of wealth, it was the most allur- 
ing; and Spain, the first discoverer, spent her 
energies in search for the precious metals. 
She had no labor to export from Spain, and 



26 THE UNITED STATES 

so she enslaved the helpless natives to do her 
work, and she thought she was growing rich 
because her ships carried across the sea car- 
goes of metal which in themselves would 
save no starving man. England was more 
fortunate. Her first seamen, such as Drake 
and Hawkins, thought, indeed, that to rob 
Spain's treasure ships was to touch the main- 
springs of well-being. The real sources of 
wealth are to be found, however, in those 
things which feed and clothe the human body 
and stir to its best efforts the human mind. 
The English settled where there was no gold, 
but where nature invited to the hard toil 
which develops character and to the adven- 
turous efforts of those who go down to the 
sea in ships. Spain found her wealth ready- 
made in gold. England had to produce 
hers, and perhaps that is why the English 
speech is dominant to-day in North America. 
Three staples of commerce new to Eu- 
rope America gave to the world — tobacco, 
Indian corn, and the potato. Without them 
our present-day civilization would indeed be 
poorer. Columbus found the natives of the 
West Indies smoking and chewing tobacco 



AND CANADA 27 

— a habit which was quickly carried to re- 
mote parts of the earth. The effect upon so- 
ciety of a single natural product is sometimes 
far-reaching. It was upon tobacco that was 
founded Virginia, the first Enghsh colony 
in North America, and from this cultivation 
of tobacco and later of cotton came the en- 
slaving by the English of the Negro, which 
has resulted in so appalling a racial problem 
of to-day. Indian corn, or maize, a native 
American product, is now one of the most 
important articles of food. It is the great 
crop of the warm, dry, rich soil of the Mis- 
sissippi valley, and it is also the chief source 
of human food in great regions of South 
Africa and Austraha. The stalk of the plant 
furnishes, besides, an amazingly rich food 
for cattle. The potato, which Sir Walter 
Raleigh took from America to Ireland, has 
played since that day its striking part in 
human history. It too became a staple food. 
The failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 
1846 caused famine and rebelHon and minis- 
tered to hot racial passions which still burn. 
It caused also the first great migration of 
Irish to America. Not less in her natural 



28 THE UNITED STATES 

products than in her pohtical institutions has 
America spread far-reaching influences over 
the world. 

The real struggle for North America lay 
between France and England. France was 
happy in her first stroke, for, as early as in 
1534, nearly a hundred years before the 
founding of Massachusetts, she was explor- 
ing in the valley of the Saint Lawrence. No 
doubt the climate was harsh, and by so much 
was France handicapped. But harsh also 
was the cHmate of New England, and it had 
no river hke the Saint Lawrence reaching 
far into the interior. There are four great 
rivers in North America draining vast areas. 
The Mississippi hes now wholly within the 
United States and became important only 
when an English-speaking people held both 
its banks. The Mackenzie and the Saskatch- 
ewan, Canadian rivers in the far north, both 
flow through inhospitable regions, as yet but 
.scantily affected by the labor of man. The 
fourth great river, the Saint Lawrence, is 
the river of North America which has played 
the most striking part in its history. In all 
the world there is no other river and lake 



AND CANADA 29 

system so fruitful in its rewards to man's 
effort. It is the only great river of North 
America flowing into the Atlantic. It 
drains Great Lakes which are among the 
wonders of the world. Populous cities have 
grown up on the shores of the inland seas 
where the volume of fresh waters gather for 
that tm^bulent journey to the ocean in which 
they thunder over the cataract of Niagara. 
^Vhere else can be found such masses of 
human beings on a single river and lake sys- 
tem? Here are Milwaukee, Chicago, De- 
troit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, Mon- 
treal, Quebec, and many other centers of 
wealth and influence. And at the portal, 
from the middle of the sixteenth century, 
stood France on guard for the ownership of 
a continent. By way of the waters of the 
Saint Lawrence she reached the flood of 
the Mississippi and claimed that too as her 
own. In the cities lying at the mouth of both 
rivers, in Quebec and in New Orleans, her 
language is still to be heard in the streets, 
the influence of her culture is apparent, 
though her political authority is gone. 

America was brought into touch with the 



30 THE UNITED STATES 

thought of Europe just when Europe itself 
was experiencing perhaps the greatest up- 
heaval in all its history. In 1492, when 
Columbus was penetrating into the unknown 
across the stormy Atlantic, Erasmus, a 
young man of twenty-six, was wrestling 
with grim poverty at Paris and spending the 
uncomfortable hours in searching another 
unknown, the unknown of man's past strug- 
gles to emancipate his own mind. If Colum- 
bus discovered America, Erasmus helped to 
rediscover antiquity and to open its treasures 
to an eager world. Two years after the first 
voyage of Columbus a conquering French 
army marched across the Alps into Italy and 
began that mastery by the alien conqueror 
which if, for the time, it ruined Italy, helped 
to expand the minds of the invaders. At the 
same time far away in the north a peasant 
boy with a quick mind and an inquiring faith 
was growing into the maturity which made 
Martin Luther a disturbing but vital force 
in the life of the age. Germany and France 
and England were shaken by the explosion 
of new forces, and just when the fight was 
keenest in Europe Jacques Cartier was 



AND CANADA 31 

raising on the Saint Lawrence the fleurs-de- 
lis of France. 

It was a great era. Its controversies 
haunt still our society and have played their 
part in the hardening processes which have 
formed our modern national and racial types. 
There were those who believed that its re- 
vived interest in art and learning and reli- 
gion meant the dawn of a golden age. Thus 
it is that in all periods of high emotion men 
have consoled themselves for the imperfec- 
tions of the present by the promise of the 
future. The day of disillusion came quickly. 
Before the end of the century Montaigne 
had described human life in its true tints of 
gray and brown, with high lights of radiant 
sunshine and also deep shadows of suffering 
and sorrow. By the beginning of the sev- 
enteenth century America was to Europe a 
solid reality, only half known, it is true, but 
already the scene in which national and reli- 
gious passions had aroused the fiercest activ- 
ities of war. Europe was torn by the bitter 
antagonisms of Catholic and Protestant. 
Spain and Portugal had succeeded in hold- 
ing all of South America and some of North 



32 THE UNITED STATES 

America for the Catholic faith alone. Eng- 
lish Protestants who founded Virginia in 
1607 were in a sense between the two jaws 
of the Catholic nut-cracker with France in 
the Saint Lawrence valley and Spain in 
Mexico. By this time, however, Spain was 
weak for aggressive purposes and the strug- 
gle for North America lay between Catholic 
France and Protestant England. 

As a colonizing power in America France 
showed what marks some of her best minds to 
this day, her passionate belief in a religious 
system based upon authority and her love 
of romantic adventure. In genius for trade 
France has never greatly excelled. The Eng- 
lish, seeking overseas new means of living 
or new foundations of society which should 
not involve acceptance of the dogmas of the 
Church of England, were severely practical 
as colonizers. They tilled the soil, they built 
ships and sailed away to trade in other lands, 
they trafficked with the natives for furs ; and 
wherever they settled they made themselves 
masters. There was little of the glow of 
romance in their prosaic doings. This, on 
the other hand, stirred many of the French, 



AND CANADA 33 

men in some cases scions of noble houses, who 
chafed at the slow activities of the farm or 
the shop. The life of the forest fascinated 
them. They became coureurs de hois, run- 
ners of the woods. Past their doors at Que- 
bec arid Montreal flowed the great tide of the 
Saint Lawrence coming from out Jthe far 
interior. Little wonder that the mystery of 
its sources haunted them. Step by step they 
explored the interior. They discovered one 
by one the Great Lakes; they reached the 
Mississippi and followed it to its outlet. On 
into the farther west they pushed. They 
reached the prairies, they saw the Rocky 
Mountains. 

The French are a virile race. No other 
breed, except perhaps the Jew, cHngs to its 
own ideals and mode of life with such un- 
conquerable tenacity. To the French, pride 
in the civilization of France and love for the 
land of France are mastering passions. In 
Europe through long ages they had fought 
the English and in America they had no 
other thought than to fight them until one 
should master the other. The English were 
of like mind. Hardly had they found them- 



34 THE UNITED STATES 

selves in Virginia when they learned tb^tthe 
French, long known to be on the Saint Law- 
rence, had actually dared in 1605 to found 
farther south a strugghng colony, Port 
Royal, on the Bay of Fundy, where now 
stands the httle town of Annapolis, in Nova 
, Scotia. Such audacity was too much, and 
in 1613, though France and England were 
not openly at war, an expedition from Vir- 
ginia destroyed this budding settlement. 
The Saint Lawrence was not to be secure 
for the French. In 1629 the Enghsh ap- 
peared at Quebec and captured this infant 
capital of New France. For a century and 
a half the struggle of one power to drive out 
the other hardly ceased. The English fitted 
out expedition after expedition against Que- 
bec, and at Quebec Frontenac, the governor, 
planned serious efforts to root out the Eng- 
lish from both the banks of the Hudson and 
from New England and to make Louis XIV 
master of New York and Boston. Of liv- 
ing peacefully side by side as good neighbors 
neither nation had any serious thought. One 
race, one language, one flag must be supreme 
everywhere in North America. On this both 



AND CANADA 35 

sides were determined. War followed war. 
Peace was only a truce. And at last, in 1760, 
the British triumphed. To them France sw' 
rendered Canada and abandoned her long 
struggle for empire in America. 

Thus it was that the British acquired all 
of America north of the Gulf of Mexic;^ 
which at that time was known to the world. 
Three types of possession had come together 
under one sovereignty. In the far north was 
the territory of the Hudson's Bay Company. 
It had acquired a generous inheritance, for 
King Charles II, by what right we shall not 
too curiously question, had given it all the 
lands bordering on the waters flowing into 
Hudson Bay, which meant the whole vast 
prairie land of the present Canadian West 
stretching away almost illimitably to the 
foothills of the Rocky Mountains. That was 
an empire in itself; yet was it httle accounted 
of in the day of final conquest. Britain had 
always claimed it, and since 1713 France had 
yielded the claim. Next to this were the 
former possessions of the French, that vast 
New France in which the Bishop of Quebec 
had at one time been spiritual lord both at 



36 THE UXITED STATES 

the mouth of the Saint Lawrence and at the 
mouth of the Mississippi. To these two ter- 
ritories must be added as still under British 
rule those fine, strong colonies which were 
so soon to form the United States. Never 
before had nation such a heritage. In all the 
world elsewhere there are no such areas of 
rich land as this realm included. It had 
possibihties in agriculture, beyond the vision 
of the most sanguine dreamer. It had wealth 
in iron and coal, the two great staples of 
industrial hfe. It had stores of gold and 
silver barely equaled in any other part of 
the world. In its wild Hfe it had the richest 
supply of furs in the world and in its chill 
waters the finest quahty of fish. In secur- 
ing Xorth America Britain had won indeed 
a triumph and to her sons and daughters 
that great land remains still in possession. 

The Seven Years' War placed England 
on a pinnacle of glory. Pitt declared that 
when peace was made France should be so 
humbled and crushed that never again should 
she be able to raise a hand against her an- 
cient enemy. The EngHsh t^-pe had pre- 
vailed, and there were few voices to whisper 



AND CANADA 37 

that in human affairs overwhehning victory 
has itself sometimes been the presage of com- 
ing defeat. Macedon and Rome and Spain 
might all have taught the lesson. England 
then had what has been called the most envi- 
able of the aristocracies in history. Her 
great nobles had vast landed estates. They 
lived in regal palaces, waited upon by count- 
less servants. Even half a century later 
Home Tooke, dining alone with the Marquis 
of Lansdowne, counted thirty attendants in 
the room. The great man traveled on the 
highways with a pomp that to-day would 
seem extravagant for a monarch. If, as 
Emerson said, twenty thousand Norman 
thieves landed in England in 1066 to con- 
quer the country, their descendants had be- 
come a stately nobility, with courtly man- 
ners and the regard for nice decorum which 
we find expressed in the pages of Lord 
Chesterfield. Boswell, with the provincial 
accent of the Scot, was assured by the pa- 
tronizing Dr. Johnson that with care he 
might almost be taken for an Englishman. 
No trader entered the charmed circle of high 
society. This was not lacking in virility, for 



38 THE UNITED STATES 

the names of many of the officers who fought 
and died on the battle field in Europe, in 
America, and in India are drawn from this 
high circle. It was in truth for the most part 
men of this class who had led in the long fight 
which had made the greater part of North 
America British and forever English- 
speaking. 



AND CANADA 39 



LECTURE II 

THE CREATION OF TWO ENG- 
LISH-SPEAKING STATES 
IN AMERICA 

Victory brings to nations pride and often 
a touch of arrogance, and this effect the com- 
plete victory of the Seven Years' War, 
crowned in 1763 by a triumphant peace, 
brought to Britain. New sources of wealth 
had been tapped in India, and London be- 
came more than ever a cosmopoHtan center. 
England rewarded the men who had brought 
her success. Pitt soon became Earl of Chat- 
ham; Amherst, the commander-in-chief in 
America, was made a peer : the name, Mon- 
treal, of his seat in the country is a reminder 
to this day of his American campaigns. 
France, on the other hand, punished her fail- 
ures. Lally, who had finally lost India, was 
done to death on the scaffold by judicial 
murder for no other reason than that he had 
failed. The civihan leaders in Canada were 
sent to the Bastille, and some of them were 
punished by heavy fines. There was bitter- 



40 THE UNITED STATES 

ness in the soul of the French and exultation 
in that of the British. They had fought 
France ever since the brave days of the Black 
Prince, four hundred years earlier, and, at 
last, seemed to have her under their feet. 
Britain was still in thought an island with a 
self-complacency which tended to make her 
impervious to the spiritual reahties of the 
outside world. In this hour of victory she 
ate, she drank, and she was merry. No other 
age in England had seen equal ostentation 
of wealth and building, such costly terraces 
and gardens, such outlay in collecting treas- 
lu-es of art. Why not? Were there not con- 
tinents tributary to Britain? 

The pomp and luxury of English hf e are, 
however, only half the story. We do not 
think wisely when we underestimate the 
eighteenth century in England. In that age 
is to be found the fruitful seed of most of 
the great movements of our own time. Even 
democracy, which has brought to us such 
complex problems, found its champions when 
London shouted for "Wilkes and Liberty." 
Toward the colonies overseas there was the 
most benevolent spirit. Both Wesley and 



AND CANADA 41 

Whitefield carried to America their spir- 
itual message. The people of America 
were, it seemed to the English, under 
the guardianship of the motherland which, 
for her part, felt for them as a parent 
feels for a child. The attitude of London 
to Boston or Philadelphia was that of finan- 
cial New York at the present time to a grow- 
ing town in Dakota or Montana. London 
should give the note. If the colonies held to 
it, they were right; if they failed to do so, 
by so much were they wrong. The colonies 
might not even have a bishop. That would be 
to confer upon them a spiritual independence 
for which as yet they were thought hardly 
fit. When they were grown up, if they de- 
sired it — and many of them feared the influ- 
ence of a masterful prelate — they should no 
longer be under the necessity of sending 
across the sea for ordination the young men 
who entered the ministry of the Church of 
England. Virginia was the oldest of the 
colonies, and not yet in Virginia was George 
Washington able to secure the quahty of 
clothes which he needed, and his supply came 
regularly from England. The manufactures 



42 THE UNITED STATES 

of America were of no great moment. Eng- 
land was the home of manufacture. Of 
course the trading classes in England played 
no serious part in politics. That was hardly 
their affair. Let them look after their fac- 
tories and shops, said the political leaders. 
The landed classes had always governed and 
had they not made England great? Si 
quaeris monumentum, circumspice. 

War, as so well we know in our own age, 
produces upon political thought an effect 
profoundly disturbing. The man who goes 
into battle has faced ultimate realities and 
tested values. He is offering his life, and 
no man can do more. In this respect the 
private is the equal of the field marshal. War 
involves a close partnership and an ultimate 
equahty of those who fight together. In the 
nineteenth century little Piedmont with its 
tiny army joined Britain and France in the 
Crimean War, and Piedmont's prime minis- 
ter, Cavour, sat with the envoys of the great 
powers when the time came to discuss peace. 
In the Seven Years' War the American col- 
onies had put their own fighting men into the 
field on a scale imequaled during any previ- 



AND CANADA 43 

ous war in America. The officers of the reg- 
ular British army considered these colonial 
forces as auxiliaries, in much the same way, 
as now they regard Indian regiments, use- 
ful if controlled and directed by regular offi- 
cers, but without the traditions and the train- 
ing to give them any value if fighting on their 
own account. This attitude is always irri- 
tating to those who find themselves either 
despised or patronized, and it was especially 
irritating after the colonial forces had given 
manly cooperation in a great war. This irri- 
tation was one of the causes of the American 
Revolution. 

The British tended to look upon the col- 
onies as their property. A continent had 
come under British control. The people 
whose ancestors had long dwelt in America 
thought the continent was theirs and had 
among themselves jealous rivalries as to its 
ownership. Virginia and Massachusetts 
wished to reach out westward as far as the 
Mississippi; New York and New Hamp- 
shire were quarreling about boundaries. 
Life in America was vivid in its vigorous 
hopes and its alluring possibilities. The 



44. THE UXITED STATES 

motherland had always been far away and 
across the sea came from her only faint 
echoes of the word of authority. She was 
inferior in that her masses had little poHtical 
power beyond the indirect one of pubhc opin- 
ion misupported by votes and expressed 
often in riotous passion rather than in rea- 
son, as witness the clamor in London for 
Wilkes and Lord George Gordon. Boston 
too had its mobs, but they read newspapers 
and had been trained in politics by their 
right to vote. England was superior in that 
she had a class of statesmen versed in the 
larger problems of national policy and 
learned in the long traditions of political 
thought from Plato to Burke. In a real sense 
Chatham and Burke and Fox saw the world 
and saw it whole. There was cosmopoHtan 
thinking in England on pohtical questions in 
a sense that makes Samuel Adams and Pat- 
rick Henry appear provmcial. The history 
of all mankind was open to Burke when he 
pondered a problem of state. The tragedy 
was that the people who, as he said, usually 
come to think right on public questions had 
no power which could respond to his appeals. 



AND CANADA 45 

We need not wonder that, facing new re- 
sponsibilities, the outcome of victory, and 
bearing new burdens, the debts of war, the 
British leaders wished, above all, security for 
the future. It was a part of their world 
outlook that they felt themselves as fully 
responsible for the men of their own race in 
America as they did for the dependent 
people in India. To this day Britain admits 
the principle that she guards the safety of 
every foot of British territory in no matter 
what part of the world. The American col- 
onies were her charge, as in time of danger 
they were ready enough to claim. It was 
certain that defeated France would try to 
recover her lost territories in America. She 
had influence among the natives, and her 
agents were assuring them that the king of 
France was still their father and leader. The 
war had scarcely ended when, in 1764, there 
were plots, risings, hideous massacres on the 
western frontiers of the English colonies. 
Britain asked them to help with their own 
defense. They were disunited, heated by 
their own rivalries, and suspicious with their 
own jealousies. They hesitated, delayed, and 



46 THE UNITED STATES 

did nothing. Then Britain, regarding the 
men of Massachusetts and Virginia as her 
own sons, in the same sense as she regarded 
the men of Devon and Cornwall, told them 
their duty, and, since they had not themselves 
met her appeal, she undertook to tax them. 
At once was it seen that they were English- 
men with a difference. They were Enghsh 
as Hampden was Enghsh in refusing to pay 
taxes imposed without their consent. But 
in a real sense they were not English, for 
they sent no members to the Parliament 
in London and considered the httle legis- 
lature of each colony as the seat of final 
authority. 

In the struggle which followed each side 
fell back upon abstract right and each had 
for its support some real measure of reason. 
It was right that the colonists, with a conti- 
nent just won for their own secure future, 
should pay ; it was also right that they should 
not pay except by their own free action. 
They were not children to be coerced by a 
parent. Enghsh Tory opinion considered 
the colonists ingrates ; while colonial opinion 
regarded George III as a would-be tyrant 



AND CANADA 47 

and his ministers as craven tools of their 
master. It is not easy to understand the 
Enghsh political system. To our time, in- 
deed, no one can read it correctly who does 
not feel the silent, secret pressure of the 
forces under a constitutional monarchy by 
which is adjusted from day to day the bal- 
ance between ancient forms and traditions 
Sand the reality of power exercised by the rep- 
resentatives of the people. George III made 
his ministers his tools, and for a time, brief 
enough but by so much too long, was master 
of the government of England. 

No passions are more extreme than those 
of a class which has built up rights on privi- 
lege and then finds its claim to power denied. 
Dr. Samuel Johnson was in his heart a good, 
just, and reasonable man, who did not know 
that when he spoke of the colonies in terms 
of extravagant contempt he was merely echo- 
ing the tone of wealth and arbitrary power in 
which he himself had no share. These people 
in America had dared to say that they could 
think and fight for themselves, and this 
seemed as ridiculous as if Hampshire should 
defy England. Only the pressure of Amer- 



48 THE UNITED STATES 

ican resistance and success made the great 
landowners who really governed England 
even think of what was happening in Amer- 
ica. Never in domestic affairs had party 
feehng been more bitter or pohtical intrigue 
more active. In such things America was an 
unwelcome intruder. England, after all, was 
in Europe, and it was issues nearer home 
which interested English statesmen when 
they gave their minds to politics. They had, 
however, many other things to occupy them ; 
building and ornamentation, sports and 
farming. Even the Whigs did not see at 
first what the quarrel in America meant. 
And in the backgroimd was an ignorant and 
intriguing young ruler with a worn-out the- 
ory of kingship in his mind and a perverse 
and restless activity of thought which made 
it literally necessary to get up very early in 
the morning to be ahead of him. He was in 
reahty Carolus Primus Eedivivus in a world 
which had outgrown the Stuart conception of 
monarchy. 

When a claim to authority which has long 
seemed, if not dead, at least harmless, once 
again becomes menacing, it is likely to arouse 



AND CANADA 49 

both alarm and anger. The colonies had 
thought that what is sometimes called the 
omnipotence of Parliament was only a the- 
ory, inoperative as far as they were con- 
cerned; but now Parliament claimed the 
right to tax Lhem independently of their o^¥n 
legislatures. This stirred alarm to such a 
point that the colonies saw in every action of 
Britain affecting them some sinister design 
against their liberties. The Quebec Act, 
passed in 1774, was in reality a quite harm- 
less measure intended to provide for good 
government and content in the regions lately 
taken from France. It granted the con- 
quered people the right to retain the French 
civil law and the full liberties of their reli- 
gious system. This liberality to a helpless 
people is, however, denounced in the Dec- 
laration of Independence as only a beginning 
of an effort to impose French despotism on 
all the colonies and to revive the horrors of 
the Inquisition against the Protestants of 
the New World. No colonial leader pointed 
out the humor of such designs imputed to the 
bigoted Protestant George III. Alarms so 
fantastic .were fortified by the anger of 



50 THE UNITED STATES 

wounded pride. The Virginian, Washing- 
ton, regarded himself as the pohtical equal 
of any man living, and was filled with con- 
temptuous rage at any limitation of his dig- 
nity as a free man. The cosmopolitan Frank- 
lin was as bitter as Washington, and both 
showed a stern hatred of those among their 
countrymen who seemed willing to admit the 
claims made on behalf of the king. To the 
outraged American sense of pohtical dignity 
the Tory Loyalists were the scum of the 
earth, unfit to live. Neither side in the strug- 
gle was wholly united. The Enghsh Whig 
praised the rebellious colonists as the truest 
patriots ; the Tory in America was always a 
factor checking those in arms against the 
king. 

Each side had one dominant thought — 
that of preserving a far-spreading political 
union. The continued unity of the British 
Empire is a political ideal for which many 
thousands of brave men would to-day be 
willing to die. At the present moment of 
victory after a long war it would prove a 
terrible blow to Britain's position if the Brit- 
ish nations which have united against a com- 



AND CANADA 51 

mon enemy should themselves fall apart. As 
intense was the desire after the victory 
crowned by peace in 1763 to hold together all 
the lands which were British. In America 
there was another ideal of unity, at first not 
irreconcilable with the desu-e to remain Brit- 
ish. This ideal was that America should be 
united, that protests against the policy of the 
motherland should include all that was Brit- 
ish in America and be continental in charac- 
ter. The Congress was from the first called 
Continental, Washington had a desire al- 
most passionate to include Canada and Nova 
Scotia with the thirteen other colonies. One 
of his first problems after taking up the com- 
mand in July, 1775, concerned the steps to 
be taken to effect this end and the twofold 
invasion of Canada followed. Both the Brit- 
ish and the American ideal failed of realiza- 
tion. The British union was broken up. 
The American continental union was never 
created. Of the first the great republic of 
the United States stretching from ocean to 
ocean is the result; of the second monarchi- 
cal Canada, stretching, too, from Atlantic to 
Pacific, is to-day the impressive outcome. 



52 THE UNITED STATES 

The continent was to be English-speaking, 
but it was not to be one politically. 

Small seeds produce great fruits, and it 
was seemingly but a small thing which kept 
Canada out of the American Union. The 
American inyaders in 1775 were in posses- 
sion of all of settled Canada on the Saint 
Lawrence which lay west of Quebec. In the 
whole of Canada (including civilians and sol- 
diers alike) dwelt less than two thousand 
British. There were, perhaps, eighty thou- 
sand French. But they felt no deep devotion 
Lo the British crown. Two things held Can- 
ada to its British allegiance: one was a few 
British soldiers in the fortress of Quebec un- 
der a leader. General Carleton, who hurled 
a contemptuous defiance at his "rebel" as- 
jjailants; tjhe other was the suspicion of the 
Roman CathoHc leaders of the Protestant 
md Puritan English, who even in Congress 
had denounced their church as a bloody tyr- 
army. If the masses in Canada were not 
alert on this point, the church itself watched 
and proved impervious even to the seduc- 
tions of a master of diplomacy like Franklin 
when he went on a mission to Montreal. The 



AND CANADA 53 

British fleet gave the final decision by timely 
arrival at Quebec in the spring of 1776, and 
then Britain remained firmly entrenched in 
North America. It is one of the amusing 
paradoxes of history that because Canada 
liad been French it was destined in the hour 
of danger to remain British when nearlv all 
that was of British creation in America 
broke from the old allegiance. 

A new type of citizen now appeared in 
Canada. Ever since the blustering days in 
March, 1770, when many hundreds of weep- 
ing exiles had crowded on ships in Boston 
harbor m flight before the impending sur- 
render of the city to Washington, there had 
been a stream of exiles into the lands which 
now form Canada. They were sad at leav- 
ing homes which they or their ancestors had 
created in the English colonies, and they 
were angry on account of the causes of their 
exile. Some of them were educated ; the best 
blood of Massachusetts and New York — and 
it was in many cases the best blood of Eng- 
land too — ^flowed in their veins. Some of 
them were rough and ignorant. Because 
they had held to their British allegiance they 



54 THE UNITED STATES 

had lost their property ; they themselves had 
been social outcasts, the victims of outrage 
by clamorous mobs ; they had been obliged to 
take the long and weary path to exile; and 
now they were forced to hew out new homes 
for themselves in a land of stiff forests and 
wintry snows. Some of them would have 
been glad if each stroke of the axe to make 
their clearings might have been a stroke at 
the neck of a hated "rebel" who had profited 
by driving out his loyalist neighbor. It was 
in this spirit that English-speaking Canada 
was begun. If the colonies were bitter 
against England, Canada was bitter against 
the colonies. In the heat of these emotions 
were founded the two English-speaking 
states of to-day. 

At the heart of each of them was an idea 
which seemed irreconcilably opposed to the 
thought of the other. In the minds of the 
founders of the American republic was 
deeply rooted the conception that they were 
bringing forth a political creation, "con- 
ceived," as Abraham Lincoln said, "in lib- 
erty," of import for all mankind, and mark- 
ing the dawn of a new day. They were 



AND CANADA 55 

proud that this system was not a survival 
from the past, but a new thing. Some of 
them felt like doing what the revolutionists 
in France did a few years later, marking the 
era by making the date of its beginning day 
one of year one of an epoch of new hopes and 
new achievements for human life. It was 
because this thing was so fresh and so sacred 
that the fathers of the American Constitu- 
tion debated earnestly about safeguards and 
checks and balances. They feared lest de- 
signing selfishness might mar the sacred edi- 
fice which they reared. They desired that 
to the oppressed of all mankind a new door 
of hope should remain open for the pursuit 
of liberty and happiness. America was itself 
new, a continent ahnost untouched. Prov- 
idence seemed to have reserved it for this 
last and greatest achievement. 

The traveler of to-day who visits the great 
cataract of Niagara and follows the majestic 
river to its discharge in Lake Ontario will 
see at its mouth the symbols of two great his- 
torical movements. The river is the frontier 
between the United States and Canada and 
on the right bank is a fort over the white 



56 THE UNITED STATES 

walls of which, in a pleasant setting of green 
trees, floats the Stars and Stripes; while 
across the river on the left bank is a mihtary 
camp where floats the Union Jack. Here on 
the Canadian side in 1792, five years after 
the Constitution of the United States had 
been drawn up, was brought into being a new 
state based on unbroken British tradition. 
The creation of the new Canada had been 
much debated across the sea in Great Britain. 
Pitt and Burke and Fox had taken part in 
the discussion. Xo longer was Canada only 
French and Cathohc. Xo longer could it 
be ruled under the despotic principles of 
mihtary conquest. Fifty or sixty thousand 
Loyahsts had taken refuge in British Xorth 
America and must be given the pohtical hb- 
erties of Enghshmen. Xor could these be 
denied to their French fellow- citizens in Can- 
ada. Accordingly, we now have what had 
been New France divided into two colonies. 
One was to have a legislature to sit at Que- 
bec, the other was also to have a legislature 
with Niagara, and later Toronto, as its capi- 
tal. To Xiagara in 1792 came the first gov- 
ernor to set up the new government. He 



AND CAXADA 57 

was Colonel Simcoe, a member of the Brit- 
ish Parliament, a Devonshire squire, but 
above all a soldier. He had served in Amer- 
ica during the American Revolution and was 
one of the gallant band of officers with Corn- 
walhs when in 1781 he surrendered at York- 
town. To Simcoe the American republican 
system was anathema. He clung passion- 
ately to the old loyalties and here he was in 
1792 the leader in an effort to reconsecrate 
and continue them in North America. Far 
away in that other Canadian capital, Que- 
bec, Sir Guy Carleton, now Lord Dorches- 
ter, who had commanded at New York until 
the last Loyahst had been secure in his pro- 
tection, was directing another government 
for the French province. It is typical of 
the attitude of Canada toward the new re- 
pubhc that two prominent soldiers who had 
fought against the American Revolution 
should have presided over the political crea- 
tion of the new Canada, One capital was 
soon shifted from Niagara to Toronto, and 
to this day there and at Quebec laws are 
made and justice is administered in the name 
of King George. 



58 THE UNITED STATES 

The eighteenth century had little experi- 
ence of republics and no great love for them. 
Switzerland was the only stable republic in 
Europe, and it was a loose federation of 
small states, safe in their obscurity, until, a 
little later, they should happen to stand 
across the path of a soldier like Napoleon, 
who would then use them as he pleased. The 
Venetian republic had a long and .notable 
history, but it was in the control of a privi- 
leged oligarchy and its days were numbered. 
That a republic could not endure was a 
staple of Europe's political thinking. Thus, 
to many, the United States by becoming a 
republic was taking an easy path to destruc- 
tion. It was monarchy which could hold and 
save Canada in a system intended, as Simcoe 
said, to be the very image and transcript of 
that of Great Britain. Those were days of 
Tory rule in England, and, in spite of Whig 
protests, Canada was to be modeled on the 
Tory ideal. Religion, if only it were Prot- 
estant, should be endowed by the state. 
There was to be a landed aristocracy, and the 
squire was to be the leader in rural commu- 
nities as he was in England. There was to 



AND CANADA 59 

be a second chamber in the legislature, 
where in due course the members of a Cana- 
dian peerage should sit by right of birth and 
rank. Stubborn conditions will not, how- 
ever, lend themselves to making one political 
society the exact copy of another. They for- 
bade that Canada should have squires and 
peers. Neither are to be found in the Legis- 
lature which still sits at Toronto, and there 
is not even a second chamber. A House of 
Lords was in truth no necessary accompani- 
ment of the British ideal. What was vital, 
the continuance of unbroken tradition, linked 
with the institution of monarchy, remains, 
and one may hazard the opinion that to this 
day it is as strong among the legislators who 
sit in Toronto as it is among those who sit 
in London. 

If the traveler to Niagara had happened 
to drop in upon Simcoe on the morning of 
September 17, 1792, he would have found a 
stirring scene. There were clearings along 
the river and already a goodly number of 
settlers ; but, for the most part, the eye would 
fall upon dark masses of forest, already be- 
ginning to show the tints of autumn. \ Sim- 



60 THE UNITED STATES 

coe had issued a proclamation inviting set- 
tlers to come into his province — but on one 
condition : they must take oath to support to 
the utmost of their power the authority of 
King and Parliament. There were already 
more than ten thousand people in the prov- 
ince, an election had taken place for mem- 
bers of the legislature, and now on this day 
Simcoe, as representing the king, was about 
to open the first session with pomp as nearly 
regal as he could make it. He could, in truth, 
as far as military parade went, make a brave 
show. He had soldiers enough; there was 
abundance of red coats and pipe clay; and 
Simcoe could array himself and his men in 
imiforms as fitting as those at Westminster 
for the opening of Parliament. On the banks 
of the wonderful river stood the rude Free- 
masons' hall where met for the time the 
Houses of Parliament. Cannon boomed out 
the royal salute. The two Houses gathered 
in the Upper Chamber, and Simcoe read the 
Speech from the Throne to the assembled 
legislators. There were, it is true, only nine 
members of the Upper House, which he 
hoped some day might be a House of Lords, 



AND CANADA 61 

and sixteen of the Lower House. They were 
plain farmers and storekeepers from homes 
rough enough, but they knew what they were 
about. One of the first things they did was 
to enact that English law should run in the 
province, and then they proceeded to pro- 
vide a courthouse for each district and with it 
a jail for offenders. Slavery had already 
a footing in the country. Indians had sold 
captive negroes to the settlers, who found 
their labor valuable. But slavery was 
quickly ended. The old traditions of Eng- 
land and England's \s.w still stood firmly 
intrenched in North America. 

It was a far cry from Simcoe's littb capi- 
tal to that of hi§ fellow soldier Washington. 
In this same year, 1792, Washington was 
elected for his second term as President of 
the United States. The two English-speak- 
ing countries thus started each in its new 
course at about the same time. Washington 
administered a Constitution which, as its cre- 
ators fondly hoped, contained the best from 
every system. It has endured, and under it 
at the present time are governed nearly twice 
as many Enghsh-speaking people as are to 



62 THE UNITED STATES 

be found in the whole British Empire. The 
belief of Europe that a republic could not 
endure has been falsified. It has borne the 
sternest test that a political system can en- 
dure — ^that of civil war. At times every con- 
stitution seems to lumber heavily and the 
American Constitution is no exception. 
Montesquieu had said that "when the leg- 
islative and executive powers are united in 
the same person . . . there can be no liberty," 
and the f ramers of the Constitution accepted 
his teaching that "power should be a check 
to power." The result has been that at times 
in the history of the United States one power 
has checked another to the detriment of the 
real interests of the nation. Congress has 
thwarted and defied the head of the execu- 
tive government, and the head of the execu- 
tive government has thwarted and defied 
Congress, until there has been thought of 
turning to that parliamentary government 
which in the British system makes the legis- 
lative authority supreme over the executive. 
In the British system, however, there hai^ 
been a similar defect taking a different form. 
During generations the hereditary House of 



AND CANADA 63 

Lords has thwarted the will of the elected 
House of Commons and paralyzed the au- 
thority of the representatives of the people. 
No political system can claim exemption 
from defects or a monopoly of advantages. 
In Canada the working of the traditional 
British system was far from smooth. The 
governor sent out from Great Britain long 
claimed that a colony was unlike the mother- 
land, since, in a colony, the final exercise of 
executive authority rested with the appointed 
governor, who was under no compulsion to 
adopt the responsible government operating 
in England. The issue was fought out in 
long and troubled controversy. In 1837 and 
1838 there was armed rebellion in support of 
full responsible government. Not until 1849 
was the principle established that the Cana- 
dian Legislature could make and unmake at 
its discretion the ministries carrying on the 
government. The prime minister then ap- 
peared in Canadian politics, as long since he 
had appeared in English politics, and since 
the middle of the nineteenth century two 
Enghsh-speaking peoples have Hved side by 
side in North America, one a repubhc with a 



64 THE UNITED STATES 

new type of government, the other existing 
under the traditions of the old British mon- 
archy with changes, in effect, though rarely 
in form, which make it the expression of po- 
litical forces operating in their most recent 
developments in a democratic society. 



AND CANADA 65 



LECTURE III 

THE GROWTH OF FEDERALISM 
IN NORTH AMERICA 

In face of any new illustrations of the 
unity of the man of to-day with his own past 
some will murmur that history repeats itself 
and that there is nothing new under the sun. 
This is true of man's spirit in tTie same sense 
that it is true of external nature. All the ele- 
ments are there, but they are capable of vary- 
ing combinations. It is in these combinations 
that the unexpected is to be found. When 
some vision is outlined of what human soci- 
ety may become in the future a certain type 
of cynic is apt to dismiss the prospect with 
the remark that "human nature does not 
change." Indeed it does not any more than 
nature herself changes. In her remain al- 
ways the elements found in mother earth, the 
sun, the wind, the rain, and the changing 
seasons. But, even under the control of 
pigmy man, these forces may be combined 
and re-combined, without change in their 



66 THE UNITED STATES 

ultimate quality, until here is a desert, like 
that at the present moment of a strip of 
France, three hundred and fifty miles long, 
and elsewhere a smiling garden, a noble 
building, or a picture gallery. Human na- 
ture does not change. It, like external na- 
ture, is under the laws of its own being. But 
the combinations of its energies change 
under the control of man's own will. In his 
hands are the issues of justice and injustice, 
of war and peace, of ultimate decency or of 
ultimate brutality. 

Pascal outlined the course of human his- 
tory in his saying that "all mankind in the 
course of the ages is as one man who exists 
forever and who is eternally learning." The 
child is father of the man, but the man is not 
the child. He has passed into another phase 
of life, the expression of all his past. To 
his enduring quaUties of character have been 
added experience, knowledge — if you hke, 
disillusion. He looks out upon the world 
with a calmer deliberation, a more penetrat- 
ing insight. It is a commonplace to say that 
it is we, and not our forefathers, who are the 
true ancients, for we survey the longer ex- 



AND CANADA 67 

panse of human action. Out of the past of 
man's needs and aspirations is being eternally 
evolved in society some new thing. In poli- 
tics the English-speaking people in particu- 
lar are incessantly creating fresh apphcations 
of old principles. We shall find in the Poli- 
tics of Aristotle some of the most far-reach- 
ing principles affecting man as a political 
animal. The amazing insight of the Greek 
thinker laid bare for all time the sources in 
man of all the tangled web of self-interest, 
intrigue, idealism, and sacrifice which we call 
politics. He saw these operating in little 
states, based on the principle of slavery. He 
could not foresee that on the hillsides of Ju- 
dasa would be preached by a sad-faced 
teacher a doctrine of man's brotherhood 
which should in time exorcise the spirit of 
slavery from the hearts of those who accepted 
his teaching. He could not foresee that when 
England gave the world the idea of repre- 
sentative government the large state would 
dome into being composed of freemen who 
should choose representatives to make laws 
and levy taxes. He could not foresee new 
conditions in a New World out of which 



68 THE UXITED STATES 

should come vast states governed under fed- 
eral institutions like in some ways, and yet 
unlike what Greece herself had produced. 

The most striking phase of modern poKti- 
cal society is found in the wide extent of the 
individual state combiued with government 
on the basis of representative uistitutions. It 
is not easy to explain why the big state has 
seemed to become necessary. The individual 
may certainly be as happy in the small state 
as in the large one. In the small state he 
counts for more and is in some respects freer, 
for the smaller community can give consid- 
eration to personal needs in a way impossible 
in the great one; it is, for instance, noticed 
in the United States that federal law is exe- 
cuted with more unvarTing" ri^or than is 
state law. Perhaps we owe the large state 
of our time to the facility of iatercourse 
which is possible in modern society. In 
earher times in Europe ( and the same is true 
to this day in the backward parts of the 
world) communities only a few miles apart 
had little in common and felt no need of 
union. Printing has brought the easy circu- 
lation of ideas, so that men who never see 



AND CANADA 69 

each other learn to agree or to differ on 
questions that arise. Out of such reflection 
comes poHtical action on a broader scale than 
was possible in the days of isolation. With 
common ideas come movement, inquiry, and 
travel. The Wars of the Roses, just at the 
time when printing was discovered, began 
the shattering of the isolation of Enghsh f eu- 
dahsm, and out of this came the centrahzed 
Tudor monarchy, an authority unquestion- 
ably supreme over the whole land. Henry 
VIII boasted in his pride that no other mon- 
arch dare look him in the face. One great 
state made others necessary. Soon Richeheu 
made France a centralized monarchy, and 
from that age the evolution of the great state 
has been the most absorbing factor in poli- 
tics. Representative institutions have helped 
to make the large state, since under them the 
electors need not, as in the Greek repubhc, 
come together in one place to vote, but could 
send from each locahty men chosen to act 
for them. 

When the thirteen colonies were changed 
by their political independence into thirteen 
sovereign states it was certain that, if they 



70 THE UNITED STATES 

obeyed the spirit of the time, they would 
form some kind of political union. Among 
the thirteen were bitter jealousies and rival- 
ries, but over all lesser interests was domi- 
nant the need of the big state. Complete 
amalgamation was neither possible nor desir- 
able. The states were of differing types. 
Even in New England, Connecticut was un- 
like Massachusetts. When John Adams, of 
Massachusetts, first visited New York and 
Philadelphia he was as alert to note differ- 
ences as is a Parisian in London. Georgia, 
lying hundreds of miles away, in days, too, 
when roads and bridges were either bad or 
lacking, and travel was slow, had, like Vir- 
ginia, a different type of society, with negro 
slavery at the basis of the system. Thus it 
was that out of differences and distance, out 
of war and the danger of war, out of a com- 
bined particularism and cosmopolitanism 
came in America the necessity of federal 
union, if it was to be union at all. Under 
such a system the big state and the little state 
might be only different aspects of one whole. 
From the new conditions of hfe in America 
was evolved a new type of pohtical society. 



AND CANADA 71 

which was to prove of absorbing interest to 
all mankind and to be copied in Europe, 
Australia, and Africa, as well as in all parts 
of the two continents of America. 

Federal government involves division of 
power between a central government and a 
state or provincial government. This is per- 
haps its most obvious feature, but it is not 
the whole story. If, in some aspects, the 
whole controls the parts in a federal system, 
the parts must, in their turn, control the 
whole. The British Commonwealth, leaving 
out of sight the self-governing Dominions, 
is made up of states, such as the great Em- 
pire of India and large colonies like Jamaica, 
which have their legislatures and a consider- 
able measure of self-government, and are at 
the same time under a central authority, but 
the Commonwealth is not a federation, for 
these parts have no share in this central au- 
thority. In a real federation like the United 
States, while the government at Washington 
legislates for Connecticut and Idaho, these 
in their turn elect representatives who play 
their due part in carrying on the government 
at Washington. Under the terms of a writ- 



72 THE UNITED STATES 

ten agreement, called a constitution, the 
division of power is definitely marked. A 
federation, it has been said, is made, not born. 
It is not, like the mass of law and custom 
composing the so-called British constitution, 
a growth, which can shift from day to day 
the incidence of authority, unbound by any 
implied contract. Federalism is the result 
of definite agreement. Each party to the 
agreement has allotted to it definite powers 
and the legal right, defensible in the law 
courts, to retain these powers unimpaired. 
A federal system is a work of art, created 
and completed in the consciousness of its 
significance. 

The framers of the American federation 
had one happy circumstance which made 
their task easier. All of them had had a. 
considerable training in self-government, all 
had the same British tradition in political 
thought^ and all sjpoke the same language. 
They could readily understand each other. 
Institutions do not work themselves. Those 
which conform to the highest ideals and are 
in theory perfect will work only if in the 
hands of men with instincts and training in 



AND CANADA 73 

harmony with the purpose of the system cre- 
ated. Radicals of to-day are apt to complain 
that the American system was created by 
men who had an exaggerated respect for the 
rights of property. It may be so; but this, 
at least, should be remembered, that, in spite 
of acute and even angry differences, they 
set up a new system which everyone was 
obliged to respect and to obey. It had fierce 
critics, but the critics were themselves trained 
in pohtical action. For three-quarters of a 
century it endured with no severe shock to 
its stability. It may be said with truth that 
it is the only new system imposed in an era 
of revolution, with no sword drawn in civil 
strife in protest against its creation. Later 
the sword was drawn, and then not because 
the system was inherently unfair but because 
a great human problem, that of slavery, had 
reached the point when it had to be settled 
forever. It was elemental injustice in an 
earlier age to the black man which threatened 
the ruin of the work done by the founders 
of the republic. Never did Nemesis work 
with more tragic efPect. 

The seeds of federahsm, which had grown 



74 THE UNITED STATES 

to so stable a result by the end of the eight- 
eenth century, were destined to scatter far. 
The process proved slow. Soon after the 
young republic was created it was put in 
countenance by the appearance of the sister 
French republic. The cry of this repubUc 
was not for federalism. France had long 
consisted of more than a score of provinces 
so little united in spirit that they even raised 
tariffs against each other. Now the demand 
was for "France one and indivisible." The 
Girondin party spoke vaguely of some kind 
of federal union, but this only served to em- 
bitter their terrible Jacobin enemies, who 
gloried in the supremacy of Paris over an 
indivisible France ; and the Girondin leaders 
paid on the scaffold the dread penalty of 
their proposals for a federal system. Yet 
was federalism in the air. In due course 
Napoleon, the military despot, came to the 
final ruin which was really involved in his 
assaults on liberty, and then a new Europe 
was to be stabilized. It was the idea of fed- 
eralism which for the time solved the age- 
long problem of union and cooperation of 
the German states, to the extent, at least, of 



AND CANADA 75 

keeping them from making war on each 
other. The Germanic Confederation of 1815 
was loose and unreal enough and its shad- 
owy character has excited derision among 
critics. But it is well to remember that it 
served its useful purpose of keeping the 
peace among the German peoples, and, for 
half a century, whatever their conflicts with 
other races, they did not draw the sword 
against each other. When they did, the first 
act of Prussia, triumphant over Austria, was 
to create a new and this time a real and 
potent federation of North Germany which 
a few years later became that gigantic and 
powerful union known to the world as the 
German Empire. 

The federalism of Germany was unlike the 
federalism of the United States chiefly, per- 
haps, in that it consisted of a number of les- 
ser states grouped round one great state 
more powerful than all the others combined. 
In such conditions it is not easy to provide 
for the equality of standing of the separate 
units in the great whole. This did not exist 
in Germany, in sharp contrast with what we 
find in the United States, where Nevada, with 



76 THE UNITED STATES 

less than a hundred thousand people, is the 
equal in the American Senate, which has be- 
come the more powerful of the two Houses 
of Congress, to New York with, perhaps, 
ten million people. Federal institutions, 
which are necessarily based on written law, 
depend upon the will of each of the parties 
to accept and carry out the terms of a con- 
tract. We know to-day that while the state 
constitutions in the United States have in 
many cases undergone radical revision and 
far-reaching change, that of the United 
States has had but nineteen amendments in 
more than a century and a quarter. The 
states have been loyal to the terms of their 
contract. A dominant mihtary power, how- 
ever, hke that of Prussia, was certain in a 
federal union to use the coercive influence of 
its own authority and thus to taint the 
sources of federalism. It was not in the soil 
of an armed Europe nor in that of the mili- 
tarist South American states that the seed 
of federalism took the deepest root, but in 
the British Coromonwealth. It became the 
pupil of the United States, and has brought 
forth fruit of which its teacher need not be 



AND CANADA 77 

ashamed. And the first pupil to take the 
lesson to heart was Canada. 

During the nineteenth century had grown 
up on the northern borders of the United 
States six British colonies, each of them with 
its own marked characteristics. Nova Sco- 
tia was proud to have been a British land 
long before Canada became British. In 
Nova Scotia had floated the British flag ever 
since, in 1710, a raid from New England 
across the Bay of Fundy had been success- 
ful, and what had been the French fort of 
Port Boyal had become the British fort of 
Annapolis, named in honor of the dull and 
obstinate but good queen who then reigned. 
At the time of the American Revolution a 
new colony. New Brunswick, had been 
carved out of Acadia, of which Nova Scotia 
was a part, and which had been ceded by 
France under the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. 
Hither and to Nova Scotia had come some 
of the best blood of New England to live un- 
d'er the British flag. Newfoundland and 
Prince Edward Island, though alike in that 
each lay apart from the mainland, across a 
strip of sea, were wholly different in type. 



78 THE UNITED STATES 

Newfoundland was a colony chiefly of fish- 
ermen. Prince Edward Island a colony 
chiefly of farmers. Their population was 
small, but each of the colonies had its legisla- 
ture, its civic pride, and its obstinate sense 
of independence. Farther north and stretch- 
ing along the majestic Saint Lawrence west- 
ward far beyond the boundary of the last of 
the Great Lakes was Canada. The two divi- 
sions created in 1791 had in 1841 been 
brought together into an uneasy and un- 
happy union. They were in type almost 
wholly separate. One was prevailingly 
French and Cathohc, the other prevailingly 
EngHsh and Protestant, composed, indeed, 
largely of Loyalist elements from the United 
States. Here was the raw material for a 
new federation, material, indeed, more in- 
tractable than that of the thirteen colonies. 
It had happily no negro problem, but it had 
the difficulty which lurks in the background 
of all Canadian questions — the French and 
Catholic standing over against the English 
and Protestant, and each of them powerful 
enough at times to check and thwart the 
other. By a strange fortune branches of the 



AND CANADA 79 

two most civilized peoples of Europe, age- 
long enemies, had come to live together in the 
same state in North America. 

Whatever their differences these people 
were alike in one respect : all were devoted to 
the traditions of monarchy. There were 
none who talked of setting up a republic. 
The monarchy of Queen Victoria was not 
the monarchy of George III. Even George 
III had been forced to obey ministers who 
had behind them a majority in the House of 
Commons. But with the obstinacy, which he 
called firnmess, he fretted, protested, and 
threatened, he intrigued to keep together a 
body of "The King's Friends" who would 
obey his will; and always his private virtues 
and his imbalanced and, in truth, insane 
temper were factors to be reckoned with by 
his ministers. It is probably true that the 
sex of Victoria led to the complete abandon- 
ment by the crown of any claim to direct 
British policy. Man is a masterful animal 
and does not like direction, in public affairs 
at least, by the female of the species. Un- 
der a queen the British people ruled them- 
selves through a Cabinet of their own mak- 



80 THE UNITED STATES 

ing. By 1850, except in respect to foreign 
affairs, the Canadians did the same. There 
was no longer any ground of friction between 
the two peoples. They were happy in com- 
mon traditions. Probably Canada was the 
more vigorous in its expressions of devotion 
to the crown. It had, too, confidence in Brit- 
ish statesmen. Pitt had broken the degrad- 
ing prevalence of corruption in British poli- 
tics. The buying and selling of seats in 
Parhament had ended. No doubt voters 
were still bought, but it was by indii^ect and 
not grossly direct methods. To the worlds to 
Canada at least, by 1860, Britain stood as a 
marvel of political purity, inciting to rever- 
ence and imitation. 

Thus it was that, in 1864, when the six 
British provinces sent delegates to Quebec 
to consider the problem of political union, 
they were proud to put in the forefront of 
their ideals that they desired to frame a con- 
stitution similar in principle to that of the 
United Kingdom. On the face of it they 
were doing nothing of the kind. They had 
the dominant thought of creating a federa- 
tion, while the United Kingdom expressed in 



AND CANADA 81 

its name the idea of complete political union 
under a single legislature. The thought of 
any other type of union had never seriously 
appealed to the British mind. When in 1707 
England and S (jot land had been united, it 
is debatable whether it would not have been 
wise to create a federal state rather tlian a 
United Kingdom. The day was to come 
for another union, that with Ireland, and 
had Scotland preserved in 1707 a local legis- 
lature, controlling, as every American State 
and every Canadian province now controls, 
measures which touch education and reli- 
gion, the precedent might have proved val- 
uable. The Kirk of Scotland would have 
remained established by authority of the Par- 
liament of Scotland; Edinburgh would have 
remained a real capital, a center of political 
power, and would not have become merely 
a provincial city. Above all, the example of 
vScotland would have been a powerful argu- 
ment for leaving to Ireland authority touch- 
ing education and religion, the lack of which 
has been a cause of her dire unrest. The 
British, however, were not federally minded. 
By 1864 the Canadians were; and yet they 



82 THE UNITED STATES 

proclaimed their desire to create as nearly 
as possible a copy of the United Kingdom. 

They created a federation. But in the 
horn* of decision some of the six colonies drew 
back. Newfoundland preferred, and con- 
tinues to prefer, her isolation. For a time 
Prince Edward Island adopted the same 
course, but after a few years found the 
larger wisdom. For the absence of New- 
foundland there was the abounding com- 
pensation of including in the Canadian union 
the far-spreading empire of the prairie coun- 
try west of the Great Lakes and also the 
mountains and valleys, the sea-coast and the 
islands, of British Columbia, the latter an 
achievement which added softness of climate 
to the rigor of the eastern provinces. Just 
as the United States secured quickly its 
fruitful western area beyond the Missis- 
sippi, when once stable federal government 
had been created, so did Canada, when real 
political power was intrenched at Ottawa, 
reach out from the Great Lakes to the 
Pacific. 

The new Canadian federalism showed 
deep-seated but not wholly obvious contrasts 



AND CANADA 83 

with that of the United States. On the sur- 
face, indeed, there was striking similarity. 
The provinces in Canada had powers less 
extensive than those of the States but simi- 
lar to them. The House of Commons in 
Canada, like the House of Representatives 
in the United States, expressed the prin- 
ciple of representation from each division in 
proportion to its population, while the Ca- 
nadian like the American Senate embodied 
the idea of safeguarding the interests of 
smaller units by giving them representation 
without regard to disparity of numbers. 
The contrasts were, however, real. In the 
Canadian federal constitution there was little 
detail, little definition. Power was divided 
between federal and provincial legislatures, 
organs of government were created and, in 
large measure, that was all. There were no 
prohibitions in regard to confiscating prop- 
erty, to establishing a state church, and to 
the many other things forbidden in the con- 
stitution of the United States. There was no 
system of checks and balances. Fictions in 
respect to the authority of the sovereign were 
maintained. The queen was, in word, sup- 



84 THE UNITED STATES 

posed to govern, and an untutored reader of 
the constitution might imagine that Canada 
was still subject to the direct exercise of the 
royal authority. There was no mention of 
prime minister or cabinet and yet prime min- 
ister and cabinet were the pivots of the whole 
system. The official head of the state was 
without authority; yet in the sovereign and 
his representative centered the pomp and cir- 
cumstance of government. Little wonder 
that the American people, living under a 
constitution in which powers are strictly 
defined with an effort at completeness, 
should, to this day, find difficulty in under- 
standing the federal system of their northern 
neighbors. In one system words have their 
due meaning; in the other it is necessary al- 
ways to explain that many of them do not 
mean what they seem to say. It is the differ- 
ence between a new creation and a system 
based on tradition. 



AND CANADA 85 



LECTURE IV 

LIKENESSES AND CONTRASTS 

IN THE FEDERAL SYSTEMS 

OF THE UNITED STATES 

AND CANADA 

A WORLD grown old in sage experience 
ought not in practical affairs to think that 
an issue is solved by an appeal to dogma. 
In theology creeds are as often explained 
away as accepted in their obvious meaning; 
and in politics, while wise men shake their 
heads at the outworn solution for political 
evils offered in the divine right of kings, 
they are hardly less restive at bald assertions 
of the divine right of democracy. For pol- 
itics are not to be conducted successfully by 
the mere instinct of man to govern himself. 
Societies there are, but they are not human, 
which seem to arrive at an amazing degree of 
organized efficiency by the exercise of in- 
stinct, without the need of a laborious proc- 
ess of education. The bee-hive has its skillful 
architects who plan and build shapely houses. 



86 THE UNITED STATES 

its provision for sanitation and ventilation, 
its ordered solution of labor problems, its 
police, its hierarchy of government officials ; 
and yet in this compact and industrious com- 
munity we can find no trace of school or uni- 
versity in which the young are taught how 
best to perform the tasks which fall to them. 
Man is not so happy. Without education, 
a process lasting through many uncertain 
years, he puts little beneficent restraint upon 
his fiercer passions and directs but ill his own 
energies. It may be that the bees blunder, 
as man blunders, and are more dependent 
upon experience than we often imagine, but 
it remains true that the instinct of the bee 
leads it to achieve its ends in Hfe by an easier 
path than that in which man must walk. He 
must plan anxiously for the well-being of a 
complex society. It is a vast and intricate 
task which no one person can understand or 
direct. Despots have tried it and failed dis- 
astrously. A single mind could not read 
deeply enough or see far enough. And now 
the many are undertaking to solve the prob- 
lems for themselves and the road to their 
Olympus is rough and steep. 



AND CANADA 87 

In America democracy has its greatest op- 
portunity; and its success or failure in the 
American scene is perhaps of all problems 
of government the most momentous for man- 
kind. Here was a continent dowered by 
nature with riches widespread and abound- 
ing, hardly touched b}^ man. Here destiny 
might write some new story of man's well- 
being. His right to "life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness" does not perhaps cover 
the whole of his well-being, for it does not 
.express what is the gravest and yet the most 
beautiful thing in his experience, stern and 
chastening discipline in a world by him only 
partly known and mastered. If America 
was itself a clean sheet of paper, ready for 
man's scroll, he began there to write his story 
with prepossessions derived from a long rec- 
ord in Europe. Spain governed in America 
with a despotic ruthlessness, the results of 
which we see to-day in the instabihtj^ of 
many of the states which she founded. From 
the first, England, just because her migrat- 
ing sons were Englishmen, was forced, 
whether she liked it or not, to leave them to 
govern themselves, and thus, by a force work- 



88 THE UNITED STATES 

ing with the resistlessness of nature herself, 
jself-governing communities grew up in 
America. If they were to have good laws 
and good administration, they must secure 
them from whatever fountains of wisdom 
they had within themselves. No one of the 
founders was or could become so masterful 
as to be a despot, so that they could not 
prove whether, after all, in a new world, 
the vigorous wisdom of one endowed with 
power was not better than the slack wisdom 
of the many. They had no alternative but 
to create democracies. 

Democracy as now we understand the 
term is in reality a new thing. The Greek 
democracy was an oligarchy of free men in 
a society based on slavery, with no political 
power or liberty for the majority, should the 
majority be slaves. In the democracy of to- 
day all are free ; and power is in the hands of 
the many without check or limitation. Good 
government under a democracy means good 
laws and good administration achieved, if not 
by the wisdom, at any rate by the voluntary 
acquiescence, of the masses of the people. 
In all the tasks which man confronts there 



AND CANADA 89 

is none more difficult than that of so train- 
ing the many minds in a political community 
that they will both understand the common 
good and unite to achieve it. This involves 
range of vision, the capacity to see the whole, 
the magnanimity to forget petty differences 
in which man, a quarrelsome animal, is be- 
coming always involved, and to unite in the 
altruism of securing the well-being of others. 
Power to the masses must in an efficient de- 
mocracy go hand in hand with knowledge of 
how to use it for the best purposes. Selfish- 
ness is apt always to be clamorous and a self- 
ish minority, intent on using the authority 
of the state for personal gain, will seek to 
confuse issues so that the worse may appear 
the better reason. The few who know their 
minds will often win at least temporary suc- 
cess. This tyranny of the minority is not 
the less menacing because it works with the 
cooperation of the wills of those who, in the 
end, will be the losers. There is no path to 
well-being in human affairs other than the 
path along which enlightened wisdom may 
direct us, and the wisdom of the many will 
come only with the education of the many. 



90 THE UNITED STATES 

Wisdom does not dictate uniformity of 
method. No doubt from one point to another 
there is always a shortest road, the straight 
line. But even the planets in their courses 
are deflected by the attraction from a variety 
of bodies. Man certainly does not take the 
straight hne to his highest good. Politics 
are a never-ceasing struggle, and the man in 
the stress of a fight is thinking not of to- 
morrow but of to-day. One of the most de- 
structive heresies of political thought is the 
view that what proves useful in one environ- 
ment will inevitably prove useful in another. 
There is something pathetic in the name 
"New England" which the Puritan colonists 
gave to their creation. There could never 
really be a New England. The real England 
was a land of long traditions, its life shaped 
by its contact with France and other neigh- 
bors, its literature and its politics the ex- 
pression of complex forces. It had the out- 
look of a sea-faring people living on an 
island, with only a few miles of open sea be- 
tween them and continental Europe. To be 
old was of the essence of this England. But 
if England was old, Englishmen were young. 



AND CANADA 91 

and from their loved homeland they carried 
In themselves the germs of a society which 
feared God and honored the king. None 
the less did they go to a New World, and 
when the Old World laid a repressive hand 
on this new society the explosion followed 
of which echoes vibrate to this day. 

The founders of the American republic 
made a constitution, and because its terms 
are in written clauses, subject to analysis 
under the rules of grammar and of common 
sense, we consider the constitution to be 
stiffly starched and call it by the inappropri- 
ate term inflexible; while to the looser Brit- 
ish system, based on both law and custom and 
changeable either by statute or by new prac- 
tice, we give the name flexible. The writ- 
ten constitution is not however inflexible, 
for political forces cannot be fully expressed 
and controlled under the phrases of a docu- 
ment. If a fence seems to block the way 
to some needed action or reform, pohtical 
ingenuity will make its advance by passing 
over, or under, or through the fence, or by 
removing it. The framers of the American 
constitution planned the election of a pres- 



92 THE UNITED STATES 

ident by a few men, chosen for the purpose 
from each of the states, but the written con- 
stitution has been flexible enough to abohsh 
this practice in all but form and to provide 
for the choice of the president by popular elec- 
tion. The written constitution intends that 
the Senate of the United States shall really 
exercise oversight in all important federal 
appointments. In fact, under what is called 
"senatorial courtesy," the dominant political 
forces in each state often, though not always, 
control federal patronage in all but the most 
important offices. There is no inflexibility 
in respect to the surging forces of democratic 
life. 

A group of Englishmen of a literary turn 
were asked by one of their number what 
might be regarded as the most pregnant of 
current proverbs. After a pause one of them 
said: "No one knows where the shoe pinches 
but the wearer"; and the others agreed as 
to the condensed wisdom of the saying. Each 
person for himself and each nation for itself 
must find the defects which can be corrected. 
The history of modern Ireland illustrates 
with the grimness of tragedy the deep mean- 



AND CANADA 93 

ing of the proverb. Benevolent intentions 
from an authority external is no guide to the 
finding of the sore spot. No one but the 
wearer knows where the shoe pinches, and in 
a political society, under democratic condi- 
tions, the wearer must find the remedy. 
Across the Atlantic are passing exhortations 
that each side should imitate something in 
the other. Federal America sees congestion 
in the Parliament at London. It learns 
with amazement that all governmental pow- 
ers, the school system of Scotland, the char- 
tering of a petty railway in Ireland — all, 
without exception, of the problems in all 
their phases which require legislation of any 
kind, are controlled for nearly fifty million 
people from a single center. The federal 
man is aghast and cries: "Why do not you 
create a federation? Look at us!" And 
across the sea come voices which suggest 
that, rather, you should look at us. "If a for- 
eigner is murdered in Britain and his gov- 
ernment asks for an explanation, we do not," 
says the Englishman, "plead that we have 
no authority to act. We control laws re- 
specting marriage, and do not permit any 



94. THE UNITED STATES 

fenced off area to flout decency by making 
divorce absurdly easy. We turn out a head 
of our government when he has lost public 
confidence and do not keep up a fretful war 
between one high state authority and an- 
other. Look at us !" 

These comparisons at long range are not 
particularly edifying, but perhaps we may 
find nearer home suggestive likenesses and 
contrasts. A monarchy and a republic are 
close neighbors in North America, both 
subtly ahke and subtly different. When the 
federation of Canada was made, the prin- 
ciple of monarchy was so much in the mind 
of the Canadian framers of the new constitu- 
tion that they called their creation "the King- 
dom of Canada." All unconsciously to itself 
the repubhc of the United States blocked the 
realization of their plan. The time was that 
at the end of the civil war. There was irri- 
tation in the United States against Great 
Britain, and British ministers feared that 
to parade a new kingdom in North America 
before the minds of a republican people, who 
for nearly a hundred years had proclaimed 
their suspicion and dislike of monarchy. 



AND CANADA 95 

would make worse problems already difficult. 
Canada in consequence took the nondescript 
title of "Dominion." It remained true, how- 
ever, that a vital difference in the two sys- 
tems hinged on the traditions of monarchy. 
The superficial likeness between the two 
federations is so striking that Professor 
Dicey, an eminent authority on the constitu- 
tion of the British Empire, has declared that 
the fathers of the Canadian system who were 
proud to express their desire to follow closely 
the constitution of the "United Kingdom" 
would have been nearer the truth had they 
said the "United States." Though a con- 
siderable minority in Canada uses habitually 
the French tongue, English is the predom- 
inant language in both federations. With a 
common language the larger country has 
more influence on the smaller than the 
smaller on the larger, for the more populous 
state produces a greater variety of literature 
pervaded with its own ideas. Few Canadian 
newspapers circulate in the United States, 
but hundreds of thousands of copies of 
American newspapers are circulated weekly 
in Canada. The United States and Canada 



96 THE UNITED STATES 

are alike in having each a vast territory un- 
der its control — ^territory of boundless pos- 
sibihties. It is said of the United States 
that it has the best three milUon square miles 
in the world, and it may be that when the 
resources of Canada are fully known she 
can tell as good a tale. Each federation has 
both large and small political units, though 
the tendency in Canada is to divisions larger 
than those of the United States. There are 
but nine provinces in Canada to forty-eight 
states in the American union. 

Federalism has proved the protection of 
the peculiarities which grow up in commu- 
nities with differing conditions. Variety of 
laws tends to protect variety of human types 
and to perpetuate the influence of local tra- 
ditions of character and of soil. Man in the 
forests of Maine will be different from man 
in the mild climate and glaring sun and on 
the browned lands of CaHfornia, lying be- 
tween the mountains and the sea. If Maine 
and California were wholly governed from 
Washington, there would be, at any rate, 
identity of the laws under which society is 
regulated. But federalism permits of vari- 



AND CANADA 97 

ety in respect to such things as education, 
religion, the rights of property, and the rule 
of municipahties, controlled under state law. 
There was a time when some of the states 
of the Union had an established church and, 
if they chose, this they might still have. In 
Canada there is an even more sticking vari- 
ety. France was the creator of Canada and 
laid deep the foundations of her own social 
system. The French in Canada, extremely 
tenacious of the culture of their parent na- 
tion, which they regard as the most advanced 
in the world, have succeeded in keeping the 
province of Quebec prevailingly French in 
character. In its legislature usually the 
French and not the English language is 
heard. The Roman Catholic Church retains 
the privileges which it had when France was 
still the devoted daughter of that church, 
and it can still collect by process of law its 
tithes and the levies for church buildings 
made on its members. In state-supported 
schools the tenets of the chuixh are taught. 
The system of law is French in type, based 
on the Code Napoleon. Federalism thus 
lends itself to variety, a virtue or a de- 



98 THE UNITED STATES 

feet aecording to the point of view of the ob- 
server. 

The two federations, lying side by side, 
are perhaps the most completely democratic 
of any of the larger states in the world. Ed- 
ucation is widespread. Newspapers are 
read by all classes of citizens and carry their 
influence on the mind, whether it is for good 
or evil. Conditions in these two great unions 
tend undoubtedly to foster the individual's 
sense of his own importance. John Stuart 
Mill, a judge of democracy not too partial, 
said long ago that "every American is both 
a patriot and a man of cultivated intelli- 
gence." If this was a correct statement in 
Mill's time, we must admit that no longer 
is it such, but any measure of truth in it 
applies to the sister democracy, and in days 
of murmuring that democracy both does too 
much and leaves too much undone we may 
find comfort in the sense of dignity which 
the reality of power gives to manhood. It 
is something for the world that two great 
federations are working out their destiny by 
the aid of the wisdom not merely of the few 
but of the many. 



AND CANADA 99 

Sharp contrasts there are between these 
systems. Canada presents this difference 
from the United States, that it was not so 
fortunate as to include all the territory in 
North America which might seem naturally 
to belong to it. Islands are proverbially 
jealous of their independence and the great 
island of Newfoundland lying across the en- 
trance to the Gulf and River of Saint Law- 
rence has never entered the Canadian fed- 
eration. The United States, so happy in the 
entrance by consent of all the original col- 
onies, has had its own pecuhar problems in 
respect to union, for the time came when 
states which had entered the union freely 
claimed the right freely to withdraw. The 
result was civil war on a scale to stagger 
mankind. Canada, on the other hand, has 
had no serious movement for breaking up 
the union. Mutterings there were for a few 
years after federation was achieved and be- 
fore its qualities were tested, but they 
quickly died away. Even in Quebec, which 
is a nation within a nation in Canada, al- 
most no voices are ever heard in support of 
breaking away. 



100 THE UNITED STATES 

The contrasts in spirit of the United 
States and Canada go very deep. The 
American federation was created in ideahsm, 
in the hope, as we have seen, that here was 
inaugurated a great human movement. Its 
creators beheved themselves called "to vindi- 
cate the honor of the human race" in a scene 
where their labors should be remote from 
"the pernicious labyrinths of European pol- 
itics." Devotion to an ideal liberty became 
a striking characteristic of the soldier who 
fought against the British, and sometimes 
he wore on his hat or on the sleeve of his 
coat a band with the words, "Liberty or 
Death." On every recurring Fourth of 
July, the anniversary of the Declaration of 
Independence and a public holiday forever, 
the assertions of idealism were renewed. 
A great nation gave itself once a year to the 
contemplation of the principles for which the 
republic stands. The Fourth of July ora- 
tion, often flamboyant in style, often colored 
by denunciation of the tyranny of monar- 
chical Britain and overwrought passion for 
liberty or dissolution, was none the less a re- 
call to idealism, and tended to perpetuate 



AND CANADA 101 

that desire to remain remote from entangle- 
ments in other continents which is still a potent 
factor in the politics of the United States. 
And at the same time, along thousands of 
miles of the northern frontier of the United 
States, a people was growing into full na- 
tional hfe who smiled, possibly with a supe- 
rior air, when the echoes of American ideal-^ 
ism reached their ears. They had no Fourth 
of July celebration, no annual commemora- 
tion of the right to "life, liberty, and the pur- 
suit of happiness." Their most enjoyed an- 
imal holiday came on a fresh day in May 
when they celebrated the birthday of their 
sovereign, the descendant of George III, 
whom the Declaration of Independence de- 
nounces in terms so virile. These people 
hardly ever talked of liberty, and the alter- 
native of "liberty or death" never occurred 
\o their imagination. The United States 
was created in idealism. Canada grew out 
of tradition. If the causes are different, the 
chief result is similar. Each of the two fed- 
erations is free. 

The two systems are, however, unhke in 
their mode of working. Where custom, a 



102 THE UNITED STATES 

careful regard for practice and precedent, 
is the law of life, there is hkely to be hesi- 
tancy in asserting general principles. In an 
old society the consciousness grows up that 
the present is only a part and, it may be, a 
small part, of the record. The result is a 
frame of mind which we call conservative, 
though a better term would perhaps be ex- 
perimental, a chariness about dogma, about 
prophesying in respect to the future, about 
anything but the study and understanding of 
the things that are. Mr. Galsworthy gives 
an amusing illustration of this point of view. 
During the war an expansive American com- 
rade-in-arms says to an Enghshman: "So 
you and I are going to clean up brother 
Boche together!" And the Enghshman's 
answer is only "Really!" He will not com- 
mit himself to any enthusiastic program set- 
ting forth what he is going to do. In his long 
past he knows that many a program has 
failed. He will stick to his job for to-day 
and not say much about what may happen 
to-morrow. This living in the present may 
seem to indicate that he has no power of 
intellectual analysis and, in truth, in this he 



AND CANADA 103 

does not excel. His merit is that he keeps his 
feet on the soHd ground. 

Let us turn now to the contrasts in actual 
working of the two federal systems, one 
based upon idealism expressed in the clauses 
of a written document, the other on an Act 
{jf Parliament which is a mere outhne defin- 
ing powers and creating organs but depend- 
ent for its working upon unwritten tradition. 
We all know the chief features of the federal 
system of the United States, one of the most 
important political creations which the world 
has ever seen. The head of the state is 
chosen in every fourth year and has control 
of the executive government. He has, how- 
ever, no control over the legislative body. 
Congress, which makes laws and votes mon- 
eys, does not direct the administration of the 
law or the actual spending of money voted. 
Like the President, Congress is strictly lim- 
ited in the exercise of power, and a great tri- 
bunal, the Supreme Court, interprets with 
authority the rights of both under the consti- 
tution, which is the supreme law of the land. 
Except for "treason, bribery, or other high 
crimes," the President cannot be removed 



104 THE UNITED STATES 

from the office which he holds for four years 
— no President has ever resigned — and Con- 
gress cannot be dissolved except by the ex- 
piry of the period of time for which its mem- 
bers have been elected. The executive and 
the legislative power may continue for years 
in acute conflict, and yet one authority has 
to administer the laws and to spend the 
money voted by the other. What the Cana- 
dians call Responsible Government (a bet- 
ter term is Parliamentary Government) does 
not exist — that is to say, government in 
which the elected legislature controls and 
can change completely the personnel of the 
executive power. In the legislature power 
is divided between two chambers, each of 
them an elective body, but with greater au- 
thority, as time passed, in the second cham- 
ber, the Senate, since it has special powers 
in respect to treaties with other nations and 
to appointments to office. The central gov- 
ernment has confided to it only a limited 
range of responsibility, since the states have 
charge of all matters not specifically dele- 
gated to the federal authority, and these 
cover the important subjects of municipal 



AND CANADA 105 

government, public order, and education, 
and extend to the solemn power to impose 
and carry out the sentence of death. Federal 
courts determine suits between citizens of 
different states, but in the main federal courts 
administer federal law, state courts admin- 
ister state law ; and the two sets of tribunals 
are quite distinct in functions. 

Such in meager and inadequate outline 
are some features of the federal system of 
the United States. It is pervaded by pro- 
visions for checks and balances derived from 
two types of motive, one to safeguard the 
rights of the individual states which, claim- 
ing to be free and sovereign powers, agreed 
to a limited union and desired protection 
from possible encroachment by the central 
authority; the other to make impossible the 
growth in the state of tyranny on the part 
of a person or body intrusted with power. 
The contrasts, in words at least, to be found 
in the Canadian federation are almost ludi- 
crous. Here, side by side with the carefully 
guarded system of the United States, is a 
poHtical union based upon the conceptions of 
hereditary monarchy. In words at least the 



106 THE UNITED STATES 

sovereign makes the laws and carries on the 
executive government. An American sen- 
ator, whose insight would not be praised by 
the wiser of his countrymen, declared re- 
cently that Canadians could not be a free 
people, since the instrument under which 
they were governed was enacted not by the 
Canadian people but in so many words "by 
the Queen's most excellent majesty." He 
quoted further the horrifying statement, 
from the point of view of freedom, that "the 
executive government and authority of and 
over Canada is hereby declared to ... be 
vested in the Queen." Canadians make sol- 
emn oath to "be faithful and bear true alle- 
giance" to the sovereign, and freely admit 
themselves to be "subjects" of this ruler. 
Little wonder that when one of these clauses, 
indicating the slavery of a whole people, was 
read aloud, a senator, startled that such a 
thing could be, cried out in apparent dismay, 
"Read that again!"' Clearly, there was no 
thought of checks and balances in an instru- 
ment expressed in such terms. 

Things in Canada are not really as bad as 

» Debate in the Senate of the United States, March 8,1920. 



AND CANADA 107 

they seem, though it must be admitted that a 
nation accustomed to a constitution in which 
words are taken in their simple and obvious 
meaning is to be pardoned for some misun- 
derstanding of a constitution of parts of 
which the opposite is ahnost true — that words 
are not to be taken in their obvious meaning. 
It is a simple fact that the constitution of 
Canada is the creation of the Canadian peo- 
ple, and that in shaping it the sovereign had 
no voice whatever; that the executive gov- 
ernment of Canada is in the hands of per- 
sons chosen by the people of Canada, and 
that neither the king nor the king's represen- 
tative has in it any real share; and that a 
"subject" in Canada is just a citizen, subject 
no more and no less to the laws of the land 
than is a citizen of the United States. In a 
legal system based on tradition and itself 
the product of a long succession of slow 
changes, old forms are retained, while into 
them is read a new meaning. Usually there 
is never a decisive moment when the old 
phrases have wholly ceased to be vaHd in 
their obvious sense and new phrases could 
be employed. There is no precise time when 



108 THE UNITED STATES 

a man becomes middle-aged or old. The 
young boy and the old man are still called 
by the same name of John Doe, though the 
significance of the reality behind the name 
changes almost from hour to hour. So is it 
with a constitution which once was young but 
now is old. The phrases remain; it is their 
meaning which changes. 

To the uninitiated reader there are max- 
ims in British constitutional custom which 
seem to involve either irreverent jesting or 
statements that belong to an age when the 
king was believed to be really half divine. 
There was a time, in France, at any rate, 
when the statement that the highest law was 
the will of the king (voluntas regis, suprema 
lex) had a direct application to government; 
what the king willed was in truth law and 
was carried out as such. Out of the Re- 
naissance period, with its bitter struggles 
over religion, came the maxim applied in 
Germany, ''Cujus regio, ejus religio"\ the 
religious status of a country was determined 
by the personal faith of its ruler. These max- 
ims represent doctrines apphed to society in 
their literal meaning. But what are we to 



AND CANADA 109 

say of British maxims, not the survival of a 
long past, but themselves modern, that "The 
king never dies" and that "The king can do 
no wrong"? The first gives a fictitious im- 
mortality to the sovereign, for it only means 
that when one king dies his successor at that 
moment begins to reign, so that always there 
is a king. Everyone knows too that when we 
say, "The king can do no wrong" we do not 
mean what we seem to say, that all which 
the king does is right. The real meaning is 
that, if wrong is done — as often it is — not 
the king, but the minister who advised ac- 
tion, in the king's name, is to be held respon- 
sible. Thus a statement seemingly extrava- 
gant in the attribute it imputes to the king 
is in reality a rather extreme statement of 
democratic theory, asserting not only that 
the king can do nothing of himself, but also 
that whoever acts for him must not look to 
the king to shield him but is to be held re- 
sponsible for any evil thing in his conduct. 
There is another maxim of British con- 
stitutional theory which bears on its face 
almost the mark of blasphemy: "Parliament 
is omnipotent." We know that omnipotence 



110 THE UNITED STATES 

does not belong to man, and yet this is 
claimed for a body of men chosen in the hap- 
hazard of a modern election. What does it 
all mean? Only that Parliament has the 
right to overrule every other authority. This 
is far from omnipotence, it is in reality only 
omni-competence, yet the maxim does call 
up a vivid phase of the British system. 
No court restrains Parliament in the exer- 
cise of plenary authority. In the United 
States Congress has no control of the execu- 
tive power, and if it tries to encroach upon 
the functions of the President, there sits the 
Supreme Court in solemn gravity watching 
to protect the President in the exercise of 
his powers as it will protect Congress against 
the President in the exercise of its powers. 
No organ of government in the United 
States has power both to make laws and to 
name the officers to enforce them. This Par- 
liament does, when it makes and unmakes the 
executive government. The king can do no 
vTong, but Parliament can do what it likes, 
right or wrong, and there is no court to stop 
it, and no person, not even the king, constitu- 
tionally so immaculate ; for, during two hun- 



AND CANADA 111 

dred years, he has exercised no right of veto, 
and now by the authority of custom he no 
longer possesses the power to veto a measure 
enacted by Parhament. 

These contrasts in form between the con- 
stitutional methods of the American and the 
British systems seem on the surface so strik- 
ing as to be perverse. Yet is there a real 
) likeness. If the king never dies, it may also 
be said with truth that the President of the 
United States never dies, since from the mo- 
ment that one President retires his successor 
must be assumed to exercise authority. Thus 
a repubhc, no less than a monarchy, has a 
permanent official head. There is too in the 
American system — if the phrase may be par- 
doned — all the omnipotence which man can 
exercise. In British states full power is 
given to the legislators who are chosen to 
represent the people; in the United States it 
is, under the supreme law of the constitution, 
retained by the people themselves. They 
may make in the constitution any amend- 
ments which they please. They could pro- 
vide that the President should have despotic 
power. They could give the House of Rep- 



112 THE UNITED STATES 

resentatives a commanding authority like 
that of the House of Commons in the Brit- 
ish system, and they could make the Senate 
an hereditary body, so that sons of senators 
should step by right into the seats vacated 
by the death of their fathers. The people are 
omnipotent in the United States as is Par- 
liament in England ; under the reign of law,^ 
applied no less in the United States than in 
the British Empire, if the state, like the 
king, can do no wrong, its servants do wrong 
and are held responsible before the law for 
their actions. 

In the two systems it is not ultimate prin- 
ciples but methods of working which are 
different, and here again the contrasts are 
vivid. I am myself convinced that the deep- 
est and most important difference is in a 
mode of political action which, found in germ 
in Britain at the period of the American Bev- 
olution, has matured since then into a clearly 
defined system, known as Besponsible or 
Parliamentary Government. It was not 
effective in the time of George III. Dur- 
ing the war with the American colonies there 
came a time, in 1778, when public opinion 



'-n 



AND CANADA 113 

in England was overwhelmingly in favor of 
far-reaching conciHation which would cer- 
tainly give the colonies their freedom and 
might at the same time preserve the unity of 
the British Empire. The man whom the na- 
tion desired to take office and effect recon- 
ciliation was the Earl of Chatham. At the 
present time the sovereign could not resist 
such a demand. But George III resisted it. 
In opposition Chatham had attacked the pol- 
icy which the king chose to consider not that 
of his ministers but of himself. He hated 
Chatham with a bitter and sullen hatred, and 
now he declared that he would not have 
Chatham as his chief adviser; rather than 
submit to this slavery he would resign the 
crown. The king was able, by his control of 
a Parliament not responsive to public opin- 
ion, to keep Chatham from office, and the 
result was that the American war went on 
to the bitter end. Twenty-five years later 
George III did the same thing and refused 
the request of William Pitt, Chatham's son, 
that Fox, a leader of the opposition, should 
be given office. Though already Parhament 
made and unmade ministers, the king could 



114 THE UNITED STATES 

still keep from oiBce a man desired by the 
nation. It is not so now. The king cannot 
resist the demand of public opinion, and 
within twenty-four hours both the governing 
personnel and the policy of the state can be 
wholly altered. To test public opinion a 
general election may take place at any time, 
and in both Great Britain and Canada two 
actually have occurred within little more than 
a year. No British government is safe 
for an hour if it has lost the support of pub- 
lic opinion. It may, of course, cling to office, 
but it has no security. A breath of public 
opinion may at any moment blow out the 
flickering light of a discredited ministry. If 
pubhc opinion is fickle, this power may in- 
volve danger. In fact, governments last in 
England about as long as they do in the 
United States. 

This is Parhamentary Government, and 
time has shown it to be the most striking 
characteristic of the modern British system. 
France, having tried nearly every other type 
of administration, at last resorted to Par- 
liamentary Government under the Third Re- 
public, with the result that, while ministries 



AND CANADA 115 

have changed with dismaying frequency, the 
republic itself has endured for half a cen- 
tury. Italy has adopted it and, in spite of 
difficulties almost overwhelming, maintained 
stabihty during the Great War partly by 
changing her ministers to meet current de- 
mands of public opinion. Results may or 
may not vindicate Parliamentary Govern- 
ment. That is not the point under discus- 
sion. The fact remains that on this method 
the two great branches of the English-speak- 
ing peoples are at opposite poles. Britain 
has adopted it, and ministries and Parlia- 
ments change from day to day. The United 
States has not adopted it, and the executive 
and the legislative authority endure for fixed 
periods of time and are irremovable. 

The system of Parliamentary Government 
has had far-reaching results on British pohti- 
cal methods. It has involved recognized per- 
manent leaders of political parties. Here 
too, though, like the creation of Parliamen- 
tary Government, the system is sanctioned 
only by custom, and not by law, is one of 
the vital differences between federalism in 
the United States and federahsm in Canada. 



116 THE UNITED STATES 

In the United States candidates for the pres- 
idency are chosen anew in each fourth year, 
and the person elected becomes the party 
leader for the succeeding political campaign. 
At short and fixed intervals the struggle for 
political leadership is renewed, and the pro- 
gram, the so-called platform, of the party 
is drawn up. The successful party usually, 
but not always, has a leader in the President 
during his term of office, but his authority 
wanes or grows strong with the prospect of 
his nomination for a second term. All the 
time the chairman of the National Commit- 
tee of each party is watching and directing 
party policy. In a sense each of these per- 
sons leads his party, but the kind of leader- 
ship is different from that of a party leader 
who will himself take office and carry out 
his own policy. Under the British system 
a party always has this type of leader. He 
sits in Parliament, face to face with the rival 
leader. Isolation or seclusion is impossible. 
He is there to be questioned and criticised 
from day to day. The practice has gone so 
far in Canada that the leader of the opposi- 
tion party in Parliament is paid a salary. 



AND CANADA 117 

The leadership of a single man may long en- 
dm-e. Sir John Macdonald led the Conserv- 
ative party in Canada for nearly forty years, 
and Sir Wilfred Laurier led the Liberal 
party continuously for the thirty-two years 
prior to his death in 1919. Each of these 
leaders was prime minister and the real ruler 
of Canada for periods longer than the as yet 
unreached three terms of an American Pres- 
ident. There is no doubt that, with perma- 
nen^t leaders, changes in policy are made 
more gradually and with less friction than is 
found when both a leader and a pohcy have 
to be chosen at the same time. On the other 
hand, long tenure of a post tends to make its 
holder unreceptive and sometimes despotic. 
In England governments do not, as a rule, 
last longer than six or seven years at most, 
and the average is much shorter. In the 
United States their duration is strictly lim- 
ited by the constitution. In Canada they 
tend to last too long, owing largely to the 
difficulty of arousing public opinion in a 
population scattered over a vast area. 
. Under the Canadian, which is the British, 
system, the only persons chosen by election 



118 THE UNITED STATES 

are the members of the legislature. This 
principle applies in the federal system of the 
United States, except in respect to the office 
of the President. In the state governments, 
however, secretaries, treasurers, auditors, 
and even judges are, in varying degree, ac- 
cording to the constitution of each state, 
chosen by popular vote. In the British sys- 
tem the members of the cabinet, that is to 
say, the chief executive officers of the govern- 
ment, from the prime minister, who is really 
the Canadian equivalent of the President, to 
the least important member of his govern- 
ment, must have seats in the legislatm^e, and 
there give an account of the administration 
of their offices. To take part in the work of 
legislation is often an irksome duty for men 
weighted with complex matters of adminis- 
tration, but it has come to be regarded as in- 
dispensable to the working of parhamentary 
government. In Canada no legislature is 
chosen for a period of less than four years, 
and the federal House of Commons is chosen 
for five years. The long term is safe enough 
when, in response to public opinion, an elec- 
tion may take place at any time, but it would 



AND CANADA 119 

not commend itself in the United States, 
with the member free from attack in his seat 
for a fixed period. In Canada, as in Eng- 
land, the government is dominated by a sin- 
gle chamber, the House of Commons, whose 
will the second chamber is, in the long run, 
impotent to resist. It would be impossible to 
have two chambers of equal authority and at 
the same time to have parliamentary govern- 
ment, since, in such a case, a deadlock be- 
tween the two houses might prevent an ap- 
peal to the people. "You might as well at- 
tempt to stick a dog's tail on a lion's back" 
as to have a strong second chamber with par- 
liamentary government, said Joseph Howe, 
of Nova Scotia, and Great Britain has found 
that she must have a weak House of Lords 
if the country is to be ruled under the pub- 
lic opinion of a democracy. The contrast 
with the strength of the American Senate is 
striking. 

In the Canadian federal system there are 
restrictions on the authority of the provinces 
which stand in contrast with the rights of the 
states in the United States. In a certain 
sense the forming of the Canadian federation 



120 THE UNITED STATES 

involved the breaking-up of an earlier union 
as much as it did the creation of a new one. 
The older Canada, consisting of the two 
great provinces which are now Ontario and 
Quebec, had existed for a quarter of a cen- 
tury under a single legislature in which 
French and English members were about 
equal in number. There was intense racial 
strife and, in the end, federation was a refuge 
from an unhappy union. In such a case it 
was easy for the constitution builders to 
delegate to each of the new provinces only 
the matters which had chiefly caused friction 
— religion and education — and with these the 
other affairs of a local character. Thus it 
has come about that in Canada the provinces 
have only the powers specifically delegated 
while the central government retains all other 
authority. This principle, so sharply in con- 
trast with that applied in the United States 
of giving limited and specified powers to the 
federal government while the states retain 
ali the rest, has made it natural in Canada 
to have a common criminal law for the whole 
country, and a single judiciary, which admin- 
isters both federal and provincial law. No 



AND CANADA 121 

judges are either appointed by the provinces 
or elected in Canada. All judges are named 
by the federal government. Yet, except in 
the cases of the judges of the federal Su- 
preme Court and the single judge of the 
Exchequer Court, which deals with the finan- 
cial relations of the federal and the provin- 
cial governments, all the judges of Canada 
are paid by the provinces in which they exer- 
cise ihfeiT functions. It has been the federal 
government which has vindicated the sanctity 
of the law in the more unsettled regions, and 
this has resulted in so strong a preservation 
of order that lynching is unknown. Only 
the federal government can exercise the pre- 
rogative of pardon. No criminal undergoes 
anywhere in Canada the sentence of death 
without the gravest consideration of his case 
by the central federal authority. One impor- 
tant contrast in the two systems depends only 
on practice and has no inherent necessity. 
Canada has copied the system of England 
and has the budget control in finance. Only 
the government of the day can propose the 
expenditure of pubhc money. Each year 
the Minister of Finance submits an elaborate 



122 THE UNITED STATES 

statement of expected income and expendi- 
ture, and no additions to the proposed expen- 
diture can be made without the consent of 
the government. At this moment there is 
keen discussion as to whether the United 
States should adopt this budget system. 

To point out contrasts in the sense of sug- 
gesting that a good practice in one country 
would of necessity work amid different con- 
ditions in another is to be guilty of the arch- 
fallacy in politics that what works anywhere 
will work everywhere. Would the British 
Cabinet system under parhamentary gov- 
ernment work in the United States? We do 
not know; it is one thing to work a system 
in a compact and crowded island where every 
one, through an active press, can ponder on 
the same day the same political problems, 
and quite another to apply successfully such 
a system in an area thirty or forty times as 
gxeat, with varying climates, a large part of 
the population scattered and remote, and 
communications often slow and difficult. In 
the island public opinion is alert and united 
because it is easy to appeal to the many at 
almost the same hour. But it is not so easy 



AND CANADA 123 

to get California to ponder the problems of 
Maine, or, in a different scene from that of 
Maine, to understand conditions which may 
be alien to the thought of its people. There 
is a comforting maxim in the moral world 
that each of us gets the lot which he deserves. 
It may be true of nations that each matures 
the system best fitted to its own conditions. 
At any rate, nothing is more certain than that 
it is rarely wise to transfer the system of one 
country to another. Political philosophers 
are fond of saying that Great Britain would 
do well to adopt the federal system of the 
United States. Yet it is clear that as yet all 
practical steps to carry out such a plan have 
seemed to fail, and that to-day Ireland, sup- 
posed to be able to find the solution of its 
heart-breaking discords in a federal union 
with Great Britain, is coldly critical of such 
proposals. 



124 THE UNITED STATES 



LECTURE y 

THE PLACE OF CANADA IN THE 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 

The United States and Canada, speaking 
the same language, occupy the greater part 
of a vast continent, and it is of some import 
to mankind that they should understand each 
other. Yet in this there are pecuhar diffi- 
culties. The most vivid historical recollec- 
tion of the people of the United States is 
that once they were colonies of England, and 
that after a long and cruel war they estab- 
lished their independence and united to form 
a republic. To them the relation of parent 
to daughter state is the relation of superior 
to inferior, of a patronizing and protecting 
society to one that is as yet immature and 
weak. It must be confessed that there is in 
history abundant justification for this inter- 
pretation of the imperial relation. If, how- 
ever, it were the whole story, there would be 
at the present time no British Empire, except 



AND CANADA 125 

in the sense of a conquering England hold- 
ing some scattered islands and naval stations 
and the territory which her legions had mas- 
tered. France and Holland still have great 
possessions overseas; but they are not states 
inhabited by French and Dutch who have 
migrated from the motherland. They are 
literally possessions, with alien peoples, who, 
no doubt for their own good, are, in the ulti- 
mate analysis, held in obedience to the mas- 
ter state by mihtary power. No communi- 
ties composed of the flesh and blood of the 
motherland will ever be satisfied with an infe- 
rior status. Spain lost her colonies because 
the Spaniard in America would not l)e sub- 
ordinate to the Spaniard in Europe. The 
only other great colonizing power has been 
Great Britain. She lost her American col- 
onies because she demanded their obedience. 
On the same condition she would in time also 
have lost Canada and Austraha. There re- 
mains a great British state because of the 
growth of a different type of relation. 

So far as the self-governing nations of the 
British Commonwealth are concerned, there 
is now really no such thing as a British Em- 



126 THE UNITED STATES 

pire. An empire, one would suppose, is a 
state which has a central controlling gov- 
ernment. But although the British Parha- 
ment is, in a strictly legal, though not con- 
stitutional, sense, supreme over all British 
dominions, there is no central government 
for the whole British Empire. The Parlia- 
ment of Great Britain has no constitutional 
right to pass any measure affecting the gov- 
ernment of Canada, except merely as regis- 
tering Canada's own decisions. 'No one body 
can tax the British Empire. Canada and 
Australia and New Zealand and South 
Africa are not governed from London, nor 
have they any common government. Each 
of these nations governs itself. As long ago 
as in 1859, when Canada imposed a tariff on 
British goods and the government at London 
protested, there was no uncertain sound 
about the reply of Canada. It asserted "the 
right of the Canadian Legislature to adjust 
the taxation of the people in the way they 
deem best, even if it should unfortunately 
happen to meet the disapproval of the Im- 
perial Ministry." It is more fitting to de- 
scribe as a "Commonwealth" than as an 



AND CANADA 127 

**Empire" the state in which the different 
parts are so completely self-governing/ 

The most interesting growth in the Brit- 
ish Empire during the nineteenth century- 
was in the self-government and individuality 
of the various British peoples. There was 
very little of it in the British Empire of a 
hundred years ago. The American Revolu- 
tion removed from the Empire the only ele- 
ment overseas that could make any claim to 
self-government. After that tragic cleav- 
age between the English-speaking peoples, 
almost none of British origin were left out- 
side the homeland. In Canada, even in- 
cluding the Loyalist refugees from the re- 
volted colonies, there were fewer than one 
hundred thousand. The same is true of the 
West Indies, relatively more important then 
than now. In India there were perhaps half 
this number. And this was the whole tale 
of British people overseas. Australia, New 
Zealand, South Africa, as we know them, did 
not the n exist. There is little wonder that 

* This and succeeding paragraphs are, with some modifica- 
tions, taken from an article by the author on "The Growth 
of Nationalism in the British Empire" in The American Hu- 
iorical Review, October, 191 G. 



128 THE UNITED STATES 

the successful revolutionists of the United 
States should feel a fine scorn of the Britons 
in Canada who would not join them. These 
seemed to be misguided supporters of a 
lost cause. A tyrannous motherland had 
forfeited all right to the allegiance of her 
sons overseas, and successful revolution 
called the Canadians craven, since they did 
not join in the fight for liberty. 

It was, indeed, in the half-century after 
the Revolution that there was a real and 
united British Empire, for every part of it 
was governed from London. It is true that 
never after her loss in America did Britain 
attempt to tax her colonies. They were to 
her a costly burden. What we now know 
as the Dominion of Canada consisted of four 
or five detached provinces, each insignificant, 
each really ruled by a governor sent out from 
England, each backward and almost stag- 
nant. Little thought as yet had any of the 
colonies that they were new nations, with 
the same rights of self-government which 
Britons at home possessed. Yet was there 
a something working in these communities 
which had promise for the future. Each of 



AND CANADA 129 

them had its own legislature; each had the 
storm and tmnult of elections, in which there 
were free speech and free voting. The 
elected members, however, did not control 
the executive government ; that was the affair 
of the governor and of the Colonial Office 
in London, which appointed him. 

With the growth of population came 
changes. By 1830 there was a clamorous 
demand in Upper and Lower Canada for 
complete control by the people of their own 
local affairs. The controversy was violent. 
In 1837 and 1838 it led to armed rebellion 
by the radical element which asked for full 
political rights. Though the rebelHon was 
put down, the cause apparently lost was 
really won. A dozen years later, that is by 
the middle of the century, every British com- 
munity in North America had secured con- 
trol of its own affairs. The movement spread 
to other continents. Australia followed 
quickly. Canada was the older British do- 
minion and naturally led the way, but the 
British colonial system as a whole was 
changed, and by the mid-century its self- 
governing states in all parts of the world 



130 THE UNITED STATES 

were really freer than had been the former 
Enghsh colonies in America. 

This very change, however, brought a dan- 
ger to the British system. Why should the 
motherland take any trouble to preserve a 
tie with communities which brought her little 
advantage? They erected hostile tariffs 
against her goods, they were a charge upon 
her revenues, they were perennially relying 
upon her army and fleet for defense. Can- 
ada was frquently involved in disputes with 
the United States. In 1837-1838 there were 
frontier incidents which might well have 
caused war. A few years later there was 
the question of the boundary line in Maine, 
Then came that of the western boundary, 
with the insistent demand of American pio- 
neers in the west of "Fifty-four forty or 
fight," which meant that all south of this de- 
gree of latitude should go to the United 
States on penalty of war. There is perhaps 
not much wonder that British statesmen 
should have thought a self-governing em- 
pire overseas not worth having. Gladstone 
told Goldwin Smith that the cession of Can- 
ada to the United States would not be an 



AND CANADA 131 

impossible compensation to the North if the 
South should break away. Beaconsfield, 
Gladstone's great rival, hoped at one time 
that the troublesome colonies would become 
independent. When this was done Britain 
would be left with no European peoples 
overseas, but only with races of alien blood 
and faith whom she could really rule. 

Then, just when these depressing views 
were current, a strange thing happened. 
The half -torpid colonies in North America 
suddenly revealed a new life and a new wis- 
dom. They shook off their narrow isolation 
and formed a great federation. Fear had 
much to do with it. The United States, re- 
cently torn by civil war, was likely to become 
a great military nation, a menace to the 
British communities on its northern border. 
Because of this and of impotence and dead- 
lock in their own political affairs, the Brit- 
ish colonies united to form one great state. 
By 1872, the union of once separated colo- 
nies extended from the Atlantic to the Pa- 
cific. In this movement, if men could have 
read it aright, was the birth of a new con- 
ception of the British Commonwealth. But 



132 THE UNITED STATES 

this meaning was not seen at once. For a long 
time the old idea of the subordination of the 
colonies to the motherland still survived. But 
the movement for separation was quickly 
checked. It was one thing for British states- 
men to look on blandly while a few scattered 
colonies broke away ; but quite another thing 
to let a country like Canada go with four 
million people. After all, trade tended to 
follow the flag, and thus, even on lower com- 
mercial grounds, it would be a bad thing to 
end the colonial relation. Other reasons 
there were, too, and one of them, most potent 
of all, was that, even though Great Britain 
might be willing to let go of Canada, Canada 
had no wish to let go of Britain. 

Here we come upon one of the unexpected 
things in this strange British Empire. The 
old assumption was that when the new states 
were strong enough to stand alone they 
would wish to do so and would break away 
from the mother country. But this repre- 
sented only the coldly intellectual view of 
pohtics. In fact, political loyalties have as 
much to do with the heart as with the head. 
It never occurred to the average Canadian, 



AND CANADA 133 

even when his country reached national stat- 
ure, that he could not remain both a Cana- 
dian and a Briton. The British flag had al- 
ways been his. Why should he change? 
True, he was a Canadian first, for Canada 
was the country he knew. Britain he had 
probably never seen, and he understood but 
little of a state of society in which there were 
an aristocracy, a House of Lords, and an 
established church. Still he saw no reason 
why he should break with the old home of his 
race and no movement for separation would 
come from him. 

There was too a strong political drift 
against change. Union was in the air when 
the federation of Canada was created. This 
event followed immediately upon the reun- 
ion of the United States after the Civil War. 
The North-German Confederation was 
formed in the very year in which the British 
North America Act, creating the Dominion 
of Canada, passed the British Parliament. 
Three years later Italy was finally united. 
In the next year, 1871, came the creation of 
the German Empire. This was followed 
quickly by an eager ambition among Euro- 



134 THE UNITED STATES 

pean states to secure colonies. Trade rival- 
ries were keen, markets were needed, and 
markets under the samie flag seemed to be 
more secure than markets under an alien flag. 
It thus happened that the ungracious per- 
mission offered to the colonies about 1860 
that they might go when they liked, and the 
sooner the better, had become by 1890, thirty 
years later, the rather nervous fear that they 
might take themselves off and leave Great 
Britain to a lonely sovereignty over a de- 
pendent empire ten times more populous 
than herself. 

During all this time the movement was 
growing for unions within the Empire on 
the lines of the Canadian union. In 1900 
the six Australian states united to form a 
great Commonwealth. Most wonderful of 
all, less than ten years later, the four col- 
onies of war-worn South Africa formed a 
strong union more centralized and consoli- 
dated than any of the other unions in the 
British Empire. In no case, however, was 
union effected with the view of breaking 
away from the Empire. Rather was the de- 
sign to draw closer together. Yet each union 



AND CANADA 135 

represented a distinct type and was brought 
about in conformity with local conditions. 
Here, then, is the paradox which is charac- 
teristic of the British nations— the more 
they become separate in type the more they 
hold together. 

The unity of outlook with Great Britain 
was tested in Canada in 1899, when the 
South African War broke out. The people 
of Canada accepted without reserve the Brit- 
ish view of the issue and thousands of Cana- 
dians fought on the veldt. Britain, how- 
ever, paid the bill. Canada was not a real 
partner. It was the Great War, begun in 
1914, which brought to a head a long proc- 
ess of development. Complete self-govern- 
ment in respect to domestic affairs Canada 
had had for nearly three-quarters of a cen- 
tury. There remained, however, this lack 
of full national hfe, that she had no direct 
diplomatic relations with other states. The 
government of Canada had no power to 
deal with the government of the United 
States; a treaty made in reahty between the 
United States and Canada was in name be- 
tween the United States and Great Britain. 



136 THE UNITED STATES 

When, during the war, a Canadian War 
Mission was sent to Washington this diffi- 
culty was overcome by the subterfuge, hu- 
mihating in form if hardly so in fact, that 
the Mission might deal with the departments 
of the government of the United States but 
not with that government itself. Canada 
was not classed as an American nation, with 
the result that when a Pan-American Con- 
gress came together the American state which 
ranked in importance next to the United 
States had no place. Before the war it was 
uncertain what pa*rt self-governing states 
like Canada and Australia would take when 
Great Britain became involved in a struggle 
which should tax her full strength. The 
breathless days of the simmier of 1914 set- 
tled this doubt. Then it became clear that 
on a vital issue the whole British Empire 
would act together. No nation was more 
surprised than Britain herself by the com- 
pleteness of the union of hearts. 

This war was Canada's first war. Never 
before had she recruited and paid her own 
armies in a great struggle. People care- 
less of speech sometimes say that Canada 



AND CANADA 137 

went into the war to help England; but this 
was not really the thought of the Canadian 
people any more than it was that of the 
Scottish people. What the British peoples 
felt was that they were fighting together as 
partners. Fears there were in Canada that 
her civilian soldiers might not be able to 
bear the test of war against the greatest mil- 
itary power in the world. But before a year 
of war had passed this fear was gone. As 
thre war lengthened world-wide organization 
of British effort became necessary. In 
March, 1917, a Conference on the War of 
representatives of the whole British Empire 
was held in London, and at the same time 
the direction of the war was put in the hands 
of a new body called the Imperial War Cab- 
inet, in which sat the British, the Canadian, 
and other prime ministers. Mr. Lloyd 
George was careful to say in the British 
House of Commons that the status of the 
members of this Cabinet was one "of abso- 
lute equality." In the absence of the prime 
minister of Great Britain, the prime minis- 
ter of Canada presided, since Canada ranked 
as second among the self-governing states 



138 THE UNITED STATES 

of the Empire. Each of these states was 
by official pronouncement declared to be "an 
autonomous nation." When peace was to 
f)e negotiated it was the British Empire Del- 
egation, with Canada playing an important 
part, which directed British policy. Thus 
within the British Empire equahty of status 
between Canada and Great Britain was fully 
recognized. It remained, however, to record 
international recognition of this fact. This 
was done when peace was made. Plenipo- 
tentiaries of Canada signed the peace with 
direct official authority from the king to sign 
for Canada, exactly as plenipotentiaries of 
Great Britain signed with official authority 
from the king to sign for Great Britain. 
This was the culminating official act in a 
great political movement. The British Em- 
pire had become a Commonwealth of Na- 
tions, and each of the nations was entitled to 
the fullest expression of its national life. 

Usually the full meaning of a great con- 
stitutional change is not immediately appar- 
ent. Unless there is the upheaval of revolu- 
tion the old machinery goes on working. 
There are things which still seem to indicate 



AND CANADA 139 

that Canada is in a state of tutelage to Great 
Britain, and these things will disappear only 
slowly as occasion arises to consider and dis- 
card them. The head of the Canadian na- 
tion, acting for the king, is called the Gover- 
nor-General; he is appointed by the British 
government, and, in some measure, he is 
an official of the Colonial Office. In fact, he 
is not a governor but a viceroy, with only 
the authority in Canada which the king has 
in England; in fact, while he is appointed 
by the government in London, it is only with 
the approval of Canada ; in fact, too, the Co- 
lonial Office has no authority in Canada, for 
the prime minister of Canada and the prime 
minister of Great Britain take counsel to- 
gether and reach decisions on the important 
questions between the two countries. Can- 
ada has no Foreign Office, and, as yet, no 
ambassadors. But she has now the full con- 
stitutional right to create both when she so 
chooses. In the strict letter of the law Can- 
ada is at war when Great Britain is at war; 
but the events connected with the peace 
treaty made her separate consent to peace 
necessary and this may involve the corollary 



140 THE UNITED STATES 

that she is not at war without her specific 
consent. Far-reaching, indeed, will be seen 
to be the constitutional changes of the period 
of the Great War. 

It is to be expected that when the experi- 
ence of a few years has shown that Canada 
has her special interests in foreign affairs 
and is not content to be merely the pupil of 
Great Britain, there will be some friendly 
cleavage between the two countries. Great 
Britain has so long controlled the foreign 
policy of the British Empire, with undivided 
responsibility, that she may well feel sur- 
prise and even resentment at Canada's as- 
sertion of variant views. When Canada, as 
an American nation, takes her place in the 
assembly of the League of Nations she will 
stand more for the American than for the 
European view of world policy. In respect 
to Japan, Canada's interests are rather those 
of the United States than of Great Britain. 
Such differences of opinion will, however, 
be wholesome. They will tend to prevent 
Great Britain, after all a world state with 
vital interests in every continent, from being 
too completely dominated by interests 



AND CANADA 141 

merely Asiatic or European. At the same 
time Canada, drawn out of obscure isola- 
tion, will learn to understand the burdens 
of a great Empire. The result ought to be 
a better understanding all round. The 
British nations are really closer together in 
1920 than they were in 1850, chiefly because 
in the intervening seventy years they worked 
out the same ideals of political liberty. An- 
other cycle of years may see them united in 
sharing the same responsibilities in a world 
commonwealth, and, if this result is to be 
reached, it will be along the path of bearing, 
each state for itself, the responsibilities of 
British nationhood. 

There is no doubt that variety of environ- 
ment tends to produce a variety of peoples. 
The Canadian is different from the Austral- 
ian, and both are different from the English- 
man. The differences are physical and they 
are also mental. The man who has seen the 
society about him created in his own genera- 
tion will have a view of social relations dif- 
ferent from that of a man born into a highly 
organized society, with ancient buildings, 
traditions, and gradations of rank. It is 



142 THE UNITED STATES 

easier for an Englishman than it is for a 
Canadian to show deference and respect. 
The Canadian, in turn, is a citizen of a lesser 
state, and is humbled commercially by con- 
tact with a great neighbor much more highly 
organized than himself. The Austrahan, 
supreme in his lonely continent in the South- 
ern Sea, has no old local traditions and no 
neighbors. He creates his own standards 
and beheves in himself. When shown West- 
minster Abbey he may murmur, "Ah, but 
you ought to see the Presbyterian Church at 
Ballarat!" He is subtly different from the 
other types. The difference is not racial, 
for the race is the same. It is the difference 
caused by conditions, and it will increase with 
time. You will not flatter the Australian 
by calling him an Enghshman. He wishes 
to be known as what he is, an Australian. 
In this respect his nationalism is complete. 
This, however, is not the whole story. This 
man, so thoroughly himself in his southern 
home, is passionately a Briton and one in 
feeling with all other Britons. The thought- 
ful Australian or Canadian will deny that 
he owes any loyalty to the British Isles. He 



AND CANADA 143 

feels this no more than the Enghshman feels 
loyalty to Canada. Each of them is satisfied 
to be loyal to himself and they hold together 
because, on great national issues, they have 
the same outlook. I am a little puzzled when 
I try to explain why this unity exists. No 
doubt it is largely the result of education, of 
habitually surveying questions from a cer- 
tain point of view. Probably its deepest 
cause lies in unbroken tradition. Each of us 
is set in the midst of a system in which many 
forces are uniting to shape our conception 
of life. British political liberty has had a 
slow growth. The religious outlook, the 
education, the social relations, the tastes and 
habits of to-day come to us from a long past. 
Ill some such way as this is the note struck 
that we call British. All the people of the 
scattered British Commonwealth share it, 
and, though there are different types, widely 
separated, they have the unity of a family. 

This unity is not racial. Racial unity is 
necessarily limited to those whom birth has 
made members of the race. Thus it cannot 
become comprehensive and cosmopohtan. 
It tends to run to pride and arrogance, to 



144 THE UNITED STATES 

thoughts like those of the Hebrew that his 
race is the chosen of God. When the British 
Empire was younger we used to hear about 
the triumphant destiny of the Anglo-Saxon 
race. At one time we seemed to seek imi- 
formity, partly, perhaps, because we as- 
sumed unity of race. It was held that poHti- 
cal wisdom required in Canada and in 
Australia an exact copy of Britain. Can- 
ada, as we have seen, was to have a House of 
Lords and an established church. Experi- 
ence, the true teacher, dispelled this dream. 
In time not likeness, but diversity, of institu- 
tions was emphasized, and little thought was 
given to race. We know now that no one 
part of the British Empire can be quite like 
any other part. When we ask why, the an- 
swer is that this is the fruit of liberty. Na- 
ture herself is infinitely varied and, when 
men are free, when they adjust themselves 
to the varieties of nature, they evolve differ- 
ences. To-day no wise statesman has any 
thought of trying to Anghcize the British 
Empire. The wonder-worker is not race 
but liberty. Let us dismiss forever the super- 
stition that there is any magic in race to hold 



AND CANADA 145 

peoples together and effect political unity. 
In the late war the most determined and 
irreconcilable opponents were states of the 
same Teutonic race. It is partnership in 
common liberties which unites people. 

Without including annexations due to the 
war, the British Commonwealth represents 
about one-fourth both of the population and 
of the area of the world. The population of 
the world is about 1,800,000,000; the area 
some 51,230,000 square miles. The British 
Commonwealth is nearly evenly divided be- 
tween the northern and the southern hemi- 
spheres. Two-thirds of it are in the east and 
only one-third is in the west. The chief seat 
of power is in the west, but six-sevenths of 
the people under British sovereignty are not 
Europeans. The proportion of people of 
European origin is likely to grow, since they 
hold for occupation nearly two-thirds of the 
^vhole area of the British Commonwealth, 
with vast unoccupied spaces still to be peo- 
pled. It is a vital characteristic of the Brit- 
ish system that, in spite of the recent war, it 
is becoming less and less occupied chiefly 
with Europe. It is of the east as well as 



146 THE UNITED STATES 

of the west and of the south as well as of 
the north. It is less a creation than a 
growth, a growth out of conditions and ne- 
cessities into a syatem unprecedented in the 
history of the world. It has become a micro- 
cosm of the world itself. It includes people 
of every race and of every creed. No other 
state has ever held such vast areas in every 
continent — almost half of North America, 
much of fertile Africa, nearly the whole of 
Australasia, and a great area in Asia. In 
Europe alone is the territory of the Com- 
monwealth comparatively small in magni- 
tude. There are in it more than three times 
as many Hindus and nearly twice as many 
Moslems as there are Christians. 

"If the Canadians loved liberty," said an 
American senator recently,' "they would not 
stay under the British flag." Virginia and 
other States desired to withdraw from the 
American union and were retained within 
it by force of arms. Canada, free to go, stays 
in the British union. She is freer to go than 
was Virginia, but she remains under the 
British flag. One reason is her pride in be- 

» Debate in the Senate, March 8, 1920. 



AND CANADA 147 

ing a member of a great Commonwealth. 
Let me ask American^ a question. If the 
republic, in the slow growth of years, had 
founded kindred republics in every conti- 
nent, had fostered and protected them, had 
dreamed dreams about what this union of 
free peoples would do for mankind, would 
you willingly let this union end in disrup- 
tion? To-day British citizenship is wonder- 
ful, for it makes the Briton at home in every 
continent. Suppose that an American, sail- 
ing eastward, found himself in another 
United States in Europe under the Stars 
and Stripes. Suppose that he went on by sea 
and found himself in South Africa and still 
in the United States under his own flag. 
Suppose that he sailed on and found him- 
self in India with more than three hundred 
millions of people still under the Stars and 
Stripes. Suppose that he went on to the 
great continent of Australia and found still 
his flag, on to New Zealand, on still across 
the Pacific to America, where he has his 
home, half a continent still under the Stars 
and Stripes. In every one of these states he 
has been a citizen, needing no change of alle- 



148 THE UNITED STATES 

giance in order to vote. And this is the 
British Commonwealth. 

In this Commonwealth there is, as I have 
said, no one central government. The tie 
which links the various peoples into one is 
allegiance to the same sovereign. If I say- 
that it is the monarchy which holds together 
the Commonwealth, I am likely to be mis- 
understood, for this is apt to give the im- 
pression that there is a ruling, and not 
merely a reigning, king. The truth is that the 
monarchy expresses visibly the bond of un- 
ion which is in reality spiritual. Tradition, 
one may say again, plays a great part in hu- 
man society. Other things being equal, the 
scion of an ancient house commands greater 
influence in social circles than a member of 
the nouveaucc riches. Tradition often pro- 
duces its effect with no consciousness on the 
part of the individual that it even exists. The 
novelist plays with this instinct when, for the 
entertainment of the many, he brings on his 
stage people of ancient lineage moving in ex- 
clusive circles, in scenes of magnificence, 
with old buildings, tapestries, and pictures, 
inherited from a glorious past. When a 



AND CANADA 149 

prince passes, our eyes turn to follow him, 
less because of what he is in himself than 
because of the long tradition which he rep- 
resents. The letters "E. R." recently and 
the letters "G. R." now on mail carts in 
Canada always stir my interest. "E. R." 
"Edwardus Beccr The first of the name was 
"Malleus Scotorum/' the hammer of the 
Scots, who six long centuries ago broke his 
enemies, stood up for his kingly rights 
against a powerful church, and asserted for 
future ages in England the principle that 
what concerns all must be approved by all. 
The letters "G. R." call up a past less happy 
in what it did than useful as a warning; for 
it was a Georgius Bex who broke up in dis- 
aster the first British Empire. It is some- 
thing to the British peoples that the symbols 
are preserved which link the fruits of to-day 
with the roots of a long ago. 

The United States has nearly twice as 
many English-speaking people as has the 
whole British Empire. All these people, so 
far as political institutions are concerned, 
are in practically the same stage of poUtical 
evolution. All the state legislatures have 



150 THE UNITED STATES 

substantially the same powers and all the 
states share in the same manner in the fed- 
eral government. The American Common- 
wealth is the greatest community the world 
has ever seen with a uniform type of repre- 
sentative government over its whole vast 
area. Strikingly different is the government 
of the British Commonwealth. Even its 
sixty-five millions of peoples of European 
origin have an almost capricious variety of 
systems. Great Britain, even half a century 
ago, was governed by the nobihty and the 
upper middle class. It was with dismay that 
Queen Victoria saw the late Joseph Cham- 
berlain, a manufacturer and a supposedly 
extreme radical, take high office. Soon work- 
ing men, who had labored with their hands, 
became Cabinet ministers, and now the prime 
minister himself is from this social class. The 
House of Commons has gained final mastery 
over the House of Lords, which now can de- 
lay, but cannot permanently defeat, measures 
not to its taste. Democracy is in the saddle 
in Great Britain, but the old forms are un- 
changed. There is a king; there are peers 
and commoners; men still pursue eagerly 



AND CANADA 151 

hereditary titles of honor ; but the vitality has 
gone out of conservative reaction and the 
masses control the government. It is a far 
cry from the Whig Lord Palmerston of the 
sixties to the Lloyd George of to-day. 

In other parts of the British Common- 
wealth the logic of environment has produced 
other types of constitutions. England re- 
mains immovable in that omnicompetence of 
Parliament which keeps a-ll legislative power 
for Great Britain at Westminster. But for 
British states differently situated this sys- 
tem has proved inadequate. In 1867 Can- 
ada turned to federahsm. When, more than 
thirty years later, in 1900, Australia, after 
long hesitation, adopted federahsm, it was a 
federalism more closely akin to that of the 
United States than is the Canadian system. 
Australia took power to change its own con- 
stitution, something which, in form, Canada 
has not yet done. Ten years later South 
Africa, in a different situation, adopted for 
its four states a type of political union which 
was less a federation than a unitary state 
with subordinate legislatures of very limited 
authority. New Zealand has a single legis- 



152 THE UNITED STATES 

lature; and now India, clamoring for self- 
government, is given a system which is half 
federal in that it divides authority, but in re- 
spect to the executive power is not greatly 
unlike that of Canada sixty years ago. The 
variety of systems in the British Common- 
wealth is accompanied by what is unknown 
in the United States — a variety of official 
languages. Federal Canada uses indiffer- 
ently French or English in public affairs. 
South Africa uses indifferently Dutch or 
English. 

There is no serious movement to create a 
federal union of all the self-governing states 
of the Commonwealth. The war has fos- 
tered an acute nationalism in Canada. For 
the moment, at least, there is no prospect of 
securing Canada's assent to any form of cen- 
tralization which, in the slightest degree, im- 
pairs her own sovereignty. There exists, 
however, the machinery for consultation and 
cooperation. The absence of any real central 
authority has made the more necessary some 
means for discussing matters of policy which 
affect the British Commonwealth as a whole. 
In response to this need there met in 1887 



AND CANADA 153 

the first Conference, called then the Colonial 
Conference, but now significantly renamed 
the Imperial Conference. Since that date 
in every fourth year, at least, have come 
together representatives of all the British peo- 
ples to take counsel. The body has no man- 
datory authority; it is in very truth a Con- 
ference only ; but it discusses great problems 
and it has reached agreements and helped to 
mold the public opinion of all the British 
states. It gives at least opportunity to the 
leaders to come together, and to learn to un- 
derstand each other. One can only record a 
melancholy regret that in 1776 no such Con- 
ference had been created. If at that time the 
leaders of all the British states had been able 
to sit quietly round a table to discuss their 
differences, the story of the world might 
have had some happier pages. 



154* THE UNITED STATES 



LECTURE VI 

THE FUTURE 

In the stress of a great conflict it gives 
men pleasure to picture the days of peace 
when they may rest from their labors. It 
is a paradox of life that idealism flourishes 
most in times which are farthest from the 
ideal. Amid the horrors of war we picture 
with intense hope the joys of peace. Thus 
it happened that during the Great War we 
dreamed and hoped and, in many cases, be- 
lieved in a new era which should come with 
victory. This idealism was sincere, and it is 
only a shallow view to suppose that it has 
failed. But now the strain of war is re- 
moved; the dirt, the brutality, the coarse ob- 
scenity are no longer in evidence ; and we are 
not compelled in our misery to turn for com- 
fort to the ideal. Perhaps it was thought 
that the new era would come more easily than 
could be possible. But, until hope becomes 
a vice and is no longer a virtue, no wise per- 



AND CANADA 155 

son will sneer at the conviction that out of a 
world struggle must come a world awaken- 
ing to better ideals of well-being. The task 
is difficult, and when we confront it we may 
ponder the solemn words of Milton: "To 
guide . . . mighty states by counsel, to con- 
duct them from institutions of error to a 
worthier discipline, to extend a provident 
care to furthest shores, to watch, to fore- 
see, to shrink from no toil, to flee all the 
empty shows of opulence and power — these, 
indeed, are things so arduous that, compared 
with them, war is but as the play of children." 
The idealism of a time of war has a cause 
simple enough. Men are united in a com- 
mon purpose. If in the colossal strength of 
their union they can conquer the problems 
of war, they feel that they can face with ease 
the safer problems of peace. On these prob- 
lems, however, there is not the samje unity of 
conviction. Society is so organized that each 
class considers its safety to depend upon 
alert regard for its own interests. The 
wage-earner tries to get the most from the 
employer, and the employer in turn fears 
ruin if he yields too much to the wage-earner. 



156 THE UNITED STATES 

Thus the idealism of a period of war is apt to 
end with the war itself, and with peace comes 
a reversion to rival aims and rival interests. 
It is all a part of the drama of man^s life; 
but because this happens the pessimist must 
not imagine that he has gained an easy vic- 
tory. War seems to change even the fiber of 
men's minds ; there is no doubt that the late 
war, at least, has shattered a mass of con- 
victions which men accepted as ultimate with- 
out reasoning on their origins. In effect, 
if not in form, some political parties have 
disappeared and all have been shaken. A 
good many people blush to think that they 
once accepted shibboleths which now they 
see to have had no meaning. The pessimist 
sees in this the dissolution of human society. 
No doubt it is a serious thing for the con- 
ventions which men have obeyed suddenly 
to break down. But, if we have an ultimate 
faith in man, we will believe that the break- 
down means the liberation of his mind from 
what was dead and oppressive, and that he 
has the vitality to reorganize his effort on 
better lines. Out of the debris of the old 
system will come slowly, and no doubt with 



AND CANADA 157 

the pain and sorrow which accompany all 
of man's achievement, something which to 
vital insight will seem to justify his sac- 
rifices. 

Unless we can face the future in this spirit 
there is not much in the political outlook at 
the present time to cheer the heart. Europe 
is still [April, 1920] the scene of the horrors 
of war, and America is not at peace with it- 
self. On every side are unrest and suspi- 
cion. Whole peoples are suffering as they 
have never suffered before. Every effort 
of devilish ingenuity is being made to embroil 
the two great English-speaking nations. 
Perhaps humanity has learned by this time 
that the good triumphs only after evil has 
done its worst; and it may be that the very 
intensity of the efforts to create bitterness of 
leeling is proof that the dawn of a better 
tlay is near. At any rate we may regretfully 
admit that the task of shaping the relations 
'^f nations to make war impossible is so stern 
and difficult that compared with it the prob- 
lems of war itself are "but as the play of 
children." 

The two English-speaking federations in 



158 THE UNITED STATES 

North America became in the end partners 
in the Great War. There was a difference. 
From the first day Canada was clear in its 
resolve not to stand aloof, while only slowly 
and with reluctance did the American people 
see that they too must join in this struggle 
which had begun between nations in Europe. 
The difference has its roots deep in history. 
The American federation, as we have seen, 
was founded in the conviction that the repub- 
lic was to give to the world a new note in 
political life, and that one chief condition of 
success would be to keep aloof from entangle- 
ment in the worn-out politics of Europe. 
What wonder that, when this tradition had 
been fixed for a century and a quarter, and 
when suddenly Europe burst into the flames 
of a mighty conflagration, there should be 
careful scrutiny of the issue in the United 
States. At the outburst of the war in 1914 
I happened to be living in a watering-place 
where about half of the people were Ameri- 
cans and half of them Canadians. All felt 
that Germany had provoked the war and 
condemned her action. "You must remem- 
ber, however, that this is a European war. 



AND CANADA 159 

and that we are not in it," said a young 
American scholar to me. The attitude of 
the young Canadian was in sharp contrast. 
He had never been taught any tradition of 
holding aloof from entanglements in Eu- 
rope. His fear during the tremulous days 
just before the 4th of August, 1914, was 
that Britain might hold aloof. If she did, 
he even thought that Canada ought to de- 
clare war against Germany on her own ac- 
count and do her part, whether England did 
or did not share in the effort to save liberty 
in the world. 

It may be that in this contrasted attitude 
of mind we find one of the chief differences 
in the spirit of the two federations. Of all 
Europe, not excluding France, her own ally 
in the Revolution, the United States is sus- 
picious. She has made her territory the 
refuge of the oppressed, and the multitudes 
who have flocked to her shores from Europe 
to find hberty have strengthened rather than 
weakened her conception of the dangers from 
European intrigues. Canada, on the other 
hand, has preserved a close tie with a Eu- 
ropean state, and has had a child-like beHef 



160 THE UNITED STATES 

in this state as playing a magnanimous role 
in world politics. If, in wide circles in the 
United States, everything which England 
proposes or does is to be scanned with a 
suspicious eye, in Canada the presumption 
is that the politics of Britain are the purest, 
her system the most wisely democratic, and 
her statesmen the best trained and the most 
high-minded of any in the world. When the 
Canadian constitution was framed, all par- 
ties were unanimous in trusting the tribunal 
known as the Privy Council, which sits in 
London, to say the final word when any dis- 
putes should arise as to the interpretation 
of the constitution. To this day Canadian 
lawyers cling to the right of ultimate appeal 
to this tribunal as a guarantee that the best 
judgments will be given which human wis- 
dom can achieve. Thus it happened that 
when Britain was involved in the war there 
was not a moment's hesitation in Canada. 
For what was at stake she was ready to 
pledge her all, and did in the end pledge it. 
In this she was not unique. Australia and 
New Zealand made sacrifices as great and 
the whole British Commonwealth was united 



AND CANADA 161 

in measure not thought, even by astute 
statesmen, to be possible. 

Paradox lingers on the path of all our 
efforts, and it is certainly true that out of 
this unity has come a new emphasis upon 
the right, and, indeed, the need, of each of 
the nations in the Commonwealth to live its 
own distinct national life. The paradox is 
less striking than it seems. No compulsion 
could have produced the unity. It was rather 
the expression of free individuahty, a con- 
sensus based upon both natural instinct and 
political reflection. The strain of the great 
effort brought to each unit a vital self-con- 
sciousness. Each was free to do what it 
chose; each felt that the race for victory 
could be won only by the trained use of 
every muscle ; each felt that it was in honor- 
.able competition with the others. It was 
with a thrill of pride that Austraha and 
Canada found that their sons ranked with 
the best in the intricate achievements of war. 
This experience quickened the growth of na- 
tionaHsm, and it took unexpected forms. At 
an earher time the Canadian Pacific Rail- 
way, conceived and carried through by men 



162 THE UNITED STATES 

whose fortunes and interests centered in 
Canada, had been an achievement which de- 
manded recognition and the recognition 
which seemed most appropriate was to make 
three of its leading architects members of the 
British House of Lords. In the early stages 
of the war this recognition of Canada's ef- 
fort by British titles of honor was accepted. 
Then there came a sudden outburst against 
it. People began to say that titles of honor, 
and especially hereditary titles of honor, 
which might be in place in an old civili- 
zation, were out of place in Canada, and the 
Canadian Parliament put an end to the 
practice. 

It has not been easy for other nations to 
follow this growth of national life within the 
British Commonwealth. The United States 
had long since recognized the principle that 
the British Empire was in a fiscal sense a 
single state which might give what trade 
preferences it liked among its own members 
without raising any question of the rights 
of other countries to the treatment of the 
most favored nation. In this sense there was 
to the United States but one British nation. 



AND CANADA 163 

In the law of belligerency there was also 
one. When Great Britain was at war, Can- 
ada too was at war. It was therefore puz- 
zling to find Canada claiming definite na- 
tional status and the right to speak for her- 
self at foreign capitals, and the puzzle was 
increased as soon as the problems of the pro- 
posed League of Nations came under close 
scrutiny. When the Treaty of Peace was 
signed at Versailles, in 1919, the representa- 
tives of Canada, Australia, and other Do- 
minions signed it, and in doing so became in 
their own right members of the League of 
Nations. Thus, as parties to the peace, the 
British Commonwealth became not one but 
six nations. Yet, as we have seen, in the view 
of the United States, and for the advantage 
not of the United States but of the British 
Commonwealth, it was regarded fiscally as 
a single state. It was one, too, when a ques- 
tion of war arose. Now, in the League of 
Nations it became six. On the surface polit- 
ical paradox could no further go. 

The League of Nations has become a vex- 
ing problem in politics, and this is not the 
place to take sides on a great issue. If one 



164 THE UNITED STATES 

may summarize what the League aims at, 
it may be covered under four chief points : 

1. Publicity of treaties between states, so 
as to end secret obligations which may be- 
come a menace to the security of other states. 

2. The creation of an international court 
to give judgment in cases of disputes be- 
tween nations, and thus prevent recourse 
to war. 

3. Provision for the reduction of arma- 
ments by consent of the nation or nations 
concerned, and guarantees for the perma- 
nence of the scale of armaments agreed upon. 

4. The ending of the system of exploiting 
weak states by strong ones, and the putting 
of weak states under the ultimate guardian- 
ship of the League of Nations, with author- 
ity to give mandates to nations selected for 
the purpose to act as guardians of the weaker 
states, and under obligation to give account 
to the League of Nations for the discharge 
of the responsibility assumed. 

When the opportunity to join the League 
of Nations came, Canada entered the League 
gladly and proudly. The United States, 
however, speaking through the Senate, held 



AND CANADA 165 

back. Once more was there in evidence the 
contrast in tradition of the two federations, 
the United States dreading entanglements 
in Europe, Canada feehng herself as much 
a European as an American state, and ready 
to follow where Britain led. A nation which 
feels that it has made a special place for 
itself in the world and has based its institu- 
tions on a new application of political theory 
naturally looks with a critical eye on propo» 
sals for adopting a common policy with other 
states. The outside world wondered that 
during the war the United States never 
spoke of "allies," but always of "associated 
powers," for the good reason that she made 
no treaty of alliance with the other beUig- 
erents like that between France and Britain. 
There was working the thought that com- 
plete identity of aim was not possible be- 
tween an idealist republic and the war-worn 
states of Europe. Objection to joining the 
League of Nations thus fitted in with a vivid 
tradition. The United States must do noth- 
ing to guarantee pohtical frontiers in Eu- 
rope and thus embroil itself there; it must 
maintain its authority in respect to America, 



166 THE UNITED STATES 

and not permit non- American nations to take 
part in directing policy which might conflict 
with the principles of the Monroe Doctrine ; 
it must maintain the right to use its own 
judgment as to withdrawal from any 
League ; above all, it must not put itself in a 
position of relative inferiority to any other 
great power. Six votes for the British Em- 
pire with only one for the United States 
seemed to indicate inferior status. So rea- 
soned American idealism, and for the mo- 
ment the United States remained out of the 
League. 

The Canadian federation had its own 
idealism working to an opposite conclusion. 
The political movement, which we know as 
the American Revolution, was at first only 
a domestic protest in a matter of constitu- 
tional right. When, however, the issue was 
once confronted, American thought took a 
wider range and confronted an ultimate 
problem of human liberty. A year of strug- 
gle convinced Washington and his comrades 
in arms that they must break with a treas- 
ured past, and declare for British citizens 
in America complete independence of the 



AND CANADA 167 

motherland. The reluctance with which the 
step was taken is very marked — as marked 
as that with which the Pilgrim Fathers 
turned from their dear England to make new 
homes in a rough and unknown continent. 
The tragedy of the American Kevolutionary 
War demonstrated the truth that it is a vio- 
lation of a law of nature for a people to try 
to hold in a position of subordination com- 
munities of similar origin but of more recent 
foundation. The old have always thought 
that they could speak words of guiding wis- 
dom to the young, but the young have sooner 
or later retorted that their manhood required 
them to think for themselves. The problem 
which Canada, the second in importance of 
the Enghsh-speaking states overseas, has had 
to solve has been not less vital than that of 
the American Revolution. Could Canada 
remain a state of the British Commonwealth 
and yet attain national manhood on the basis 
of complete poKtical equality with Great 
Britain? 

When the time came for making peace, 
Canada demanded recognition as a distinct 
nation, but a nation within the complex Brit- 



168 THE UNITED STATES 

ish Commonwealth. The demand was ac- 
ceded to at Versailles. Possibly when M. 
Clemenceau so readily accepted it he had in 
his mind the thought that it really did not 
matter, since in ultimate constitutional fact 
the British Commonwealth was one in re- 
spect to the issues of war and peace, and sep- 
arate signature of the Treaty by Canada 
would serve only to reenforce an obligation 
which the single signature by Great Britain 
already created. But Canada valued the 
point. It involved the recognition by the 
whole world of a political principle which 
the leaders of the American Revolution had 
believed incredible, that within a single state 
under a single sovereign there could be dis- 
tinct nations, no one of them subordinate to 
any of the others, and yet linked together 
by ties firm enough to be strengthened, and 
not weakened, during the hard testing and 
sacrifices of war. The observer might well 
smile when he saw the United States so cau- 
tious and reserved in regard to assuming the 
obligations of the League of Nations and 
Canada so eager to accept them. But there 
was a reason. The United States, as a re- 



AND CANADA 169 

suit of a revolution, had an assured status 
before the world. Canada, long regarded as 
a colony of Great Britain, had no such status 
as a nation. For this status she was wilKng 
to pay the price by assuming responsibiUties 
as a member of the League of Nations. 

Now, with the war over, the English- 
speaking peoples must face the whole ques- 
tion of world-order. The war was a war of 
principles. It is not manly to hurl re- 
proaches at a defeated opponent, and this is 
not the time to pile up an indictment of Ger- 
many. History has given and will maintain 
its stern verdict. During many years Ger- 
many steadily refused to join in the move- 
ment to lessen by arbitration treaties the dan- 
ger of war. The nations of the world re- 
quired, she believed, leadership and, if need 
be, control from the strong and efficient. 
This she thought herself to be in a sense 
true of no other nation. Germany alone, 
as Fichte said early in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, had been intrusted with "the seeds of 
human perfection," and if Germany should 
fail, humanity would succumb. Thus not 
brotherhood, but mastery, was Germany's 



170 THE UNITED STATES 

duty, and every step needed to secure mas- 
tery was justified. "Our troops must 
achieve victory. What else matters?" said 
a certain General von Disfiirth, and he 
a^Med that Germany owed explanations to 
no one for Lou vain and Reims: "There is 
nothing for us to justify and nothing for us 
to explain away." Germany was to rule the 
world for the world's good, and, since the 
end was noble, all means to secure the end 
were permissible. Even the German sword 
had its hymn: "Day after day I ride aloft 
on the shadowy horse in the valley of cy- 
presses, and as I ride I draw forth the life- 
blood from every enemy's son that dares to 
dispute my path. . . . Am I not the flaming 
messenger of the Almighty?" 

The alternative to the German concep- 
tion is to consider mankind a brotherhood, a 
family of potential equals, in which the 
strong will help and encourage the weak 
and try to raise them to the level of the high- 
est. It is no doubt true that the greater 
part of man's record tells a story far other 
than this — a story of the robbery, the en- 
forced servitude of the weak by the strong. 



AND CANADA 171 

Only a bold nation could plead "not guilty" 
to the charge of having played some part 
in this melancholy aspect of the human 
drama, and the culmination was a world war 
in which perished something like ten million 
human beings. During the agony of this 
struggle men asked themselves whether this 
must always be so, and the heart of mankind 
said "No!" White men and brown men and 
yellow men and black men all gave the same 
aspiring answer. No one of them was will- 
ing to be under the heel of the other; all, 
as the world unrest of to-day shows, had as- 
pirations to be free and independent. There 
could be no one great and strong state dom- 
inating all the others for their good. Differ- 
ent types of men must evolve differing types 
of state. They would have misunderstand- 
ings and rivalries. Always would there be 
the danger of armed strife, and to prevent 
a renewed and even greater catastrophe 
some means must be devised of making not 
Force but Justice respected and obeyed. 
And this was the call for a League of 
Nations. 

The subject lends itself, without doubt, 



172 THE UNITED STATES 

to the platitudes and perorations of easy- 
going optimism. In eras of upheaval men 
have loved to dwell upon vague theories of 
abstract right, and the exhortation of Mira- 
beau has always some pertinence, that if 
heed is given to Duties, Rights will take care 
of themselves. In all ideahsm there is the 
perennial danger of mere pedantry. Some 
who talk of the rights of a people to self- 
determination seem to imply that every peo- 
ple has the capacity to devise and conduct a 
government, which is not true. Perhaps 
Mirabeau was right when he told the 
French National Assembly to think only 
of duties. Rights are privileges. Duties 
relate to responsibility. More and more 
does the modern state within its own border 
organize effort to protect the helpless and 
restrain the strong who seek to do evil. In 
a civilized society no one is allowed to take 
the law into his own hands, and the decent 
people unite to support the forces of order. 
Churches and individuals make great sacri- 
fices in order to uplift remote peoples by 
missionary effort. It is not too much to 
hope that such labor can be carried beyond 



AND CANADA 173 

private effort, and that nations will unite in 
sacrifices to make the world a decent place 
in which to live. 

Careless optimism has proved baneful in 
the past and may easily do so again. A 
great empire has been laid in the dust, and 
yet its sixty million people are not wholly 
crushed. From it have been taken not 
merely Alsace-Lorraine in the West, now 
protected by the powerful arm of France, 
but Polish provinces in the east, with no 
protector but the newly organized repubhc 
of Poland, which has hardly yet escaped 
from the disorder and incompetence due to 
a tragic past. Germany looks upon these 
Slav peoples as "a malleable medley of in- 
competents," and feels in regard to her lost 
Polish provinces what the United States 
would feel if by some stroke of ill-fortune 
Mexico should recover control of Texas. 
That Germany accepts her loss as final is 
hardly conceivable. She has a vast popula- 
tion which, however disunited in respect to 
forms of government, is united in feeling 
contempt for the Pole, and in a resolve to 
leave no German population under his dom- 



174 THE UNITED STATES 

ination. In seeing that this is true we need 
not read into the German mind any sinister 
desire to revive the old dream of world- 
power. That ambition is gone, probably for- 
ever. But there remains, even if we look no 
farther than the borders of the old Germany, 
enough of bitter race hatreds and rivalries 
to make armed strife at any time possible, 
and such a fire is likely to spread. What is 
the use of trying to reconstruct a shattered 
civilization if it is only again to be menaced 
steadily by the same old destructive forces, 
unchecked and unrestrained? The task 
would be too disheaTtening. Hope and 
courage need some new note to cheer them 
on. And the note that has in it vital prom- 
ise is found in the unity of aim and in the 
cooperation of the two English-speaking 
peoples. 

At this moment these two peoples are the 
strongest force ever known in human his- 
tory. In natural resources they surpass any 
measiu-e which can have been imagined in 
earlier ages. They have coal and iron, gold 
and silver, timber and rich agricultural lands, 
and climatic conditions the most suitable for 



AND CANADA 175 

human effort. They have the power to say 
of evil forces working in international af- 
fairs that they shall not prevail, power to 
hold malignancy in check, power to restrain 
ignoble greed among the nations for terri- 
tory and plunder. It is true of each of the 
two great English-speaking states that they 
.have no unachieved ambitions to make them 
)discontented and restless in respect to things 
as they now stand in the world. Germany 
was conscious of power within herself; she 
felt that the acknowledged scene of her dom- 
inance was not adequate to her capacity ; and 
she waged war in order to enlarge her bor- 
ders. There is no temptation for the Eng- 
lish-speaking peoples to attempt anything 
of the kind. They will not give up what the 
fortune of history has brought to them; but 
they desire nothing that anyone else holds. 
Neither of them has any ambitions which 
menace the other. They speak the same lan- 
guage and can understand each other's 
thoughts. They are both great trading and 
industrial nations. Both know perfectly 
well that peace is their highest interest. If 
they stand together for human well-being, 



176 THE UNITED STATES 

they can at least make the world safe from 
the menace of great wars. 

The world has had many experiences of 
plans to avert war, and we shall not be wise 
to think that after so many failures a final 
remedy is to be found. In the Middle Ages 
the Pope, the universal spiritual father, was 
to be the tribunal to which his believing chil- 
dren were to bring disputes for settlement, 
without wars. Yet war continued to flour- 
ish. It flourished with even deadher perti- 
nacity when some nations broke away from 
the papacy and the terrible wars of religion 
followed. Dynastic wars came in the wake 
of religious wars. Then in a revolutionary 
age old dynasties broke down, and a Napo- 
leon offered peace to the world on the basis 
of his own power as a soldier to hold all 
others in check. Napoleon fell, and a holy 
alliance of European rulers, who should act 
toward each other as Christian brothers, 
seemed to furnish the best promise of endur- 
ing peace. And a hundred years after the 
creation of this cure for the ills of nations 
came a World War, with destruction and 
horror on a scale surpassing anything in the 



AND CANADA 177 

previous history of mankind. It is not an 
inspiring record, but it has its conspicuous 
moral — ^that no tribunal, no mechanism of 
procedure, will save the world from war. 
Only the friendly spirit, the belief of whole 
peoples in each other's integrity, will create 
the conditions which will insure peace. 

If the English-speaking peoples cannot 
learn this mutual confidence, we may indeed 
sorrow for the future of mankind. The out- 
look of a people is molded to an extent great, 
but not capable of analysis, by its traditional 
modes of thought, by the attitude toward 
life of its classic writers, by clearly defined 
and explicit standards handed on from one 
generation to another. The Puritanism of 
England of the age of Cromwell passed into 
the fiber of the New England which sprang 
from it, and to this day it shapes the moral 
standards of millions of Americans who 
know not from what source has come the 
fashioning of their beliefs. The devout Cath- 
olic acquires from the long past of a Rome 
of which he may know nothing the tradi- 
tional beliefs and motives which touch his 
dearest hopes and affections. Thus is it 



178 THE UNITED STATES 

that tradition makes the present the child 
of the past. Peoples with differing tradi- 
tions find it hard to understand one another. 
The body of French tradition is different 
from that of Germany. The classic leaders 
and thinkers of one country are not those of 
the other, and it is not easy for a Frenchman 
and a German to attain unity of outlook. 
Montaigne may have molded the thought 
of one, Luther that of the other. There is 
above all the barrier of language. If all 
Germany spoke French or all France spoke 
German, we should probably find strange 
and unexpected results in the attitude of the 
two peoples toward each other. Friendli- 
ness might not at first increase, for mem- 
bers of the same family often quarrel be- 
cause they understand each other so com- 
pletely, but each country would know the 
thoughts of the other. The recent war 
taught the world that the German language 
concealed from understanding by other na- 
tions a mentahty well-nigh impervious to in- 
fluences from without. 

In the light of such facts one may be par- 
doned for asking again what hope there is 



AND CANADA 179 

for agreement among other nations, if the 
two EngHsh-speaking nations cannot learn 
to understand each other. From the same 
source came their most precious traditions, 
their language, their literature, their attitude 
toward hfe. They are creative peoples. 
Wherever they go they bring curiosity and 
energy to bear on what nature offers to 
man's effort; and industry and commerce 
spring up from this turning of nature's re- 
sources to the service of man. Both are self- 
reliant and masterful, but the masterfulness 
does not take the form of a desire to enslave 
others. It is the masterfulness of equals in 
free competition. Both have made great 
sacrifices to abolish the institution of slavery, 
with man owning man as property. Free- 
dom of speech, diversity of religious beliefs, 
but complete tolerance for all, a political 
system based on appeals to the judgment of 
the many — ^these are common to both peo- 
ples. Both have profoundly influenced the 
political life of the modern world. Eng- 
land has played in history the role of creat- 
ing and handing on to others representative 
institutions now accepted in every continent; 



180 THE UNITED STATES 

the United States has led in giving votes to 
the many and in forwarding that democ- 
racy, so potent for good if wise in spirit, so 
mahgnant in its working if the spirit is evil. 
We are tempted not less in domestic than 
in international affairs to satisfy om'selves 
with creating machinery, without taking the 
needed care to furnish the power which will 
make the machinery perform its proper 
tasks. In pohtics the vital thing is not the 
form but the spirit. A despotism, indefensi- 
ble in the principles which it embodies, may 
yet, if inspired by sanity and wisdom, effect 
beneficent ends, while, on the other hand, 
a holy alliance, become the tool of design- 
ing selfishness, may lure nations on to irre- 
trievable disaster. There is no magic which 
will miake a League of Nations or a democ- 
racy bring about good rather than evil, other 
than the magic of intelligent and high resolve 
expressed in energetic action. The noblest 
ideals may be perverted to base ends. The 
militarist ambitions of the soldier caste in 
Germany were concealed behind some of 
the best aspirations of a political society. 
The Germany which Bismarck created had 



AND CANADA 181 

universal suffrage, so that every man seemed 
assured of political rights; it had a costly 
and eflScient system of state education, so 
that no one need be illiterate; it had pen- 
sions for old age; it cared for the indigent, 
and boasted that in its crowded centers 
there were decency and comfort unknown 
in the slums of London or New York. Yet 
behind these good things lurked the spirit 
which made force its god and despotic power 
its end, and a world disaster followed. The 
German who read deeply enough to see 
what all this really meant was yet impotent 
to check it, for he was confronted by a pow- 
erful and ruthless hierarchy which brooked 
no interference with its aims. 

In moments of gloom we are tempted to 
think that the forces of evil are more readily 
organized than those of good; but it is not 
really so. Since evil is selfish it carries with 
it the seeds of disintegration. Any system 
based upon the denial of fundamental hu- 
man right is weak. Democracy with all its 
faults is stronger than despotism. Despot- 
ism means the power of one over the many 
and cannot be based on any hmnan right, 



182 THE UNITED STATES 

while democracy asserts the right on the 
part of the many to think and act for them- 
selves. A democratic society, however drab 
and commonplace it may seem, rests never- 
theless on a sound basis. What it needs is 
leadership which it can trust, leadership 
which will appeal to the fine things lurking 
in man's nature and not to the evil things 
also lurking there ; it needs direction by the 
best, and not by the worst, elements in our 
society. Some who think themselves initi- 
ated and in touch with reality will shrug 
their shoulders and say that the thing is im- 
possible, that there is no room in politics 
as now organized for the refined and the edu- 
cated. It is an age-old cynicism. Su T'ang 
Pu, an ancient Chinese poet, expressed it 
in his bitter reflection on the birth of a son: 
"Families when a child is born want it to be 
intelligent; I, through intelligence, having 
wrecked my whole life, only hope the boy 
may prove ignorant and stupid ; then he will 
crown a tranquil life by becoming a Cabi- 
net minister." But the cynicism does not 
express truth. The man who made the 
greatest personal impress on his generation. 



AND CANADA 183 

Theodore Roosevelt, came out of the circle 
which thought it degrading for a gentleman 
to face the rough-and-tumble of politics. I 
say nothing of his policies, which may have 
been right or mistaken, but he made himself 
felt beyond what was possible to a man of 
coarser type. Education, intelligence, and 
refinement, if linked with simplicity of char- 
acter, are assets, and not handicaps, in the 
leadership of the masses. England has one 
lesson to teach which other democratic soci- 
eties have not yet learned — that the best and 
ablest in a nation's life can find in its poli- 
tics the widest sphere for their ambitions. 

John Stuart Mill described democracy as 
"collective mediocrity." We might say the 
same of an army; indeed, of mankind as a 
whole. But this collective mediocrity fol- 
lowed an inspired Lincoln in civil affairs; 
and the masses in France followed and be- 
lieved in the greatest military genius whom 
the world has ever known. The multitude 
has the capacity to recognize a man when 
it sees him. A distracted world is clamor- 
ing for leaders who can say the word of wis- 
dom because they have intelligence trained 



184 THE UNITED STATES 

for their tasks. We confront far-reaching 
problems of capital and labor. Who but 
an educated man can understand them? 
Cobbett defined capital as "money taken from 
the laboring classes, which, being given to 
army tailors and such like, enables them to 
keep fox hounds and trace their descent from 
the Normans." There is cynical cleverness 
in the definition, but it does not go far to 
explain one of the most inti-icate problems 
of oiu* present society. One condition of a 
real belief in liberty is a prior belief in man, 
in his capacity and willingness to see and fol- 
low the good, else would hberty be only the 
license to the brute to gratify his own appe- 
tites. When we claim the right for the indi- 
vidual to judge for himself we imply the 
confidence that in the long run he will judge 
wisely and who can help him to do so if it 
is not the trained and the educated? 

There is ground for a chastened optimism 
when we look out on the world. The free 
English-speaking peoples have power. Let 
that be written in the forefront of our hopes. 
For more than a hundred years there has 
been no bloody strife between the two divi- 



AND CANADA 185 

sions. The long record of peace among some 
of the great nations takes a very wide sweep 
which seems to indicate the working of 
forces hidden to our consciousness. In the 
hands of five nations is to-day the destiny 
of the world. The nations are the United 
States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan; 
and it is noteworthy that no one of them 
has for more than a century drawn the sword 
against any of the others. They represent 
the dominant power in all the continents. 
Hardly a dog dare bark should they say the 
word of prohibition — and among themselves 
they have loved and long preserved peace. 
This is a story full of promise. Of prom- 
ise, too, though often not so regarded, is a 
part of the record of the nations which have 
been at war. We look upon the settlements 
made at Vienna in 1815 as having contained 
the seed of future strife. Yet they so en- 
dured that for forty years there was no seri- 
ous war in Europe. Nothing is clearer in 
the history of Europe during the last hun- 
dred years than that the hand of justice is 
strong to rem,ove the causes of war. Dur- 
ing that period the Turk has been at the 



186 THE UNITED STATES 

root of half the wars of Europe. His is a 
terrible record. His brutal tyranny mangled 
the very souls of the peoples of southeastern 
Europe, and recovery from their degrada- 
tion will take centuries. The Turk caused 
the Crimean war. He has been the soiu-ce 
of most of the trouble in the Balkans. He 
brought Russia and Great Britain face to 
face with war in 1878. More than once did 
his presence in Europe bring Russia and 
Austria to the verge of war. In his fatuous 
folly, after Italy and the Balkan states had 
nearly destroyed him, he plunged into the 
last great war. He has long been the key 
to European unrest. He ruled without jus- 
tice. Now, with his malevolent power gone, 
the ferment of Europe will tend to disap- 
pear. Other modern wars have been due to 
a type of injustice which broad statesman- 
ship could correct. It was injustice in Italy 
that brought Austria and France to war in 
1859. It was slavery that brought civil war 
in the United States. It was the denial of 
nationahsm, in itself a sound principle of 
political hfe, which brought the era of war 
in central Europe between 1864. and 1871. 



AND CANADA 187 

With the ahen oppressor removed and the 
rights of nationality now recognized, most 
of the causes of recent wars disappear. It 
will take time for peoples suddenly freed to 
find their natural equilibrium, but war will 
tend steadily to decrease if nations will rec- 
ognize decent standards of justice, and the^ 
free nations must assert these standards. 

It is a sound maxim of individual conduct 
to keep friendships in repair, and the maxim 
is sound, too, for nations. There is no ground 
for suspicion and antagonism between the 
English-speaking peoples. They are rivals 
in trade, but so also are persons who share a 
common citizenship and patriotism. If they 
will cultivate friendship and rebuke the 
breeders of strife, they can lead the world 
with power irresistible. To be champions 
of justice in the world, they must correct the 
injustices within their own borders. Every 
nation has some great vexing problem to test 
the vitality of its spirit of justice. Great 
Britain has the problem of Ireland, the 
United States that of the negro. Both are 
profoundly difficult and neither is capable 
of any ready-made or mechanical solution. 



188 THE UNITED STATES 

The thing to make sure of is that remedial 
processes are working vigorously. There is 
no harm in one nation criticizing another and 
pointing out defects. What does harm is 
malignancy, the deviUsh desire to create dis- 
cord. School-books foster it when they in- 
still into the minds of the children of to-day 
the worn-out passions of conflicts long since 
ended. The press fosters it when it places 
undue emphasis upon differences and for- 
gets deeper causes for agreement. Indi- 
viduals foster it when they permit them- 
selves to speak of other nations in terms of 
reproach and contempt. To keep friend- 
ships in repair we must nourish the methods 
of friendship. 

We stand to-day at the beginning of a 
new era for mankind. As never before in 
human history are minds unsettled and old 
methods of action and persuasion aban- 
doned. We confront in millions suspicion 
and discontent, so strident that timid souls 
think all is lost and abandon hope for hu- 
man society. But, unless we give up belief 
in mankind, this is not the note of true man- 
hood. Rather is the call of to-day to new 



AND CANADA 189 

faith and, on the basis of faith, hope. The 
law of sacrifice is the law of human progress. 
There is a sacrifice or, rather, a retribution, 
which is the Nemesis of national misconduct, 
and Nemesis has now demanded her full por- 
tion. The nations were selfish and greedy; 
the rich were arrogant and the poor were 
oppressed; there were dreadful sores in the 
body politic; and the screaming horror of 
war was, in part at least, nature's heaUng. 
But there were other sacrifices than those 
which purifying justice demanded. Mil- 
lions of brave men, the pride of the nations 
from which they sprang, confronted death 
with firm and sad constancy, not because they 
beheved that they must die to expiate their 
country's sin, but because they were willing 
to die as Christ died, to save mankind by a 
glorious obedience to the highest call of man- 
hood. The world stands in the light of that 
' stupendous sacrifice, and faith in what is in- 
volved in manhood makes us believe that the 
sacrifices cannot have been in vain. 

Here on the American continent two 
English-speaking federations, heirs to the 
liberty of all the ages, are living side by side 



190 THE UNITED STATES 

in the vast expanse of their territories, and 
are called to take their share of responsibil- 
ity for human well-being. The older fed- 
eration has no antagonism to the younger. 
The younger has copied the older in much 
that it has done. The older, a new type of 
political society in a new sphere, with its 
own tests and standards, shows a proud in- 
dependence of what the rest of the world 
may think. The younger is a member of a 
world-wide union; it is tied by convictions 
and sympathy to an ancient state; and it is 
following the traditions of that state. It 
would be the pride of Canada to play some 
worthy part in bringing closer together this 
ancient state and the newer society in Amer- 
ica. She owes m,uch to both ; in a deep sense 
she is a pupil of both; she has shared the 
burdens of both in the hard field of war ; and 
she is linked to both by fresh memories of 
its stern cost. 

Thus my last word, a Briton, a Canadian, 
an alien speaking in the United States, is 
this, that there is something noble to be done 
to save the world, that our two peoples rep- 
resent dominant power in the world, and 



AND CANADA 191 

that they can, if they will, achieve a mighty 
thing for mankind. The sick world needs 
the support of the strongest arms. Much 
ought to be done, and what ought to be done 
can be done. "What desertion is for the sol- 
dier, pessimism is for the civilian," said a 
French writer during the war. The war is 
over, and the problems of peace are before 
us. During war faith made us spurn any 
thought that we could be beaten. It is trea- 
son to mankind to give up hope that similar 
endurance and courage can solve our prob- 
lems of peace. 



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